Precarity and poetry

Maghiel van Crevel

Chapter 5 in Elgar Encyclopedia of Economic Anthropology, 2025, pp 305-309 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: In China, about three hundred million people have left the countryside for the cities since the 1980s, to escape from poverty, unemployment, and the strictures of village life. Popularly known as “battlers,” a colloquial expression that signals precarity, these internal labor migrants are a key component of the Chinese work force in industrial manufacturing, construction, courier delivery, domestic help, the hospitality industry, sex work, etc. Many work under grueling conditions and face systemic discrimination. One of the ways their predicament becomes visible is through the phenomenon of “battler poetry.” While this poetry is overdetermined by its authors’ social experience, it cannot be reduced to the predictable product of circumstance. The sheer diversity of the poets’ voices highlights their individual creative agency, all the more so in a cultural practice whose representations are often framed in generalities on socioeconomic structure.

Keywords: China; Labor migration; Precarity; Poetry; Dagong (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
ISBN: 9781035312566
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