The goal of this panel is to provide a forum for examining how contemporary Chinese poetry articulates forms of embodied witness and gives voice to marginalized subjects under conditions of social, political, and economic constraint. While poetry is often understood as a medium of personal expression or aesthetic reflection, this panel begins from the premise that poetic form can function as a site of witnessing, one that is grounded not in abstraction, but in the materiality of the body, labor, and lived experience. In this sense, poetry becomes a mode of registering violence, precarity, and resistance, even as it grapples with the limits of representation.
Across diverse contexts, state violence, industrial labor, gendered oppression, and Indigenous identity, what unites the works examined here is an attention to bodies that are constrained, exploited, or rendered invisible within dominant narratives. These poems do not simply describe suffering; they stage it through language, image, and form. The body appears as both a site of inscription and a medium of articulation, where experience is neither fully representable nor entirely suppressed. If witnessing traditionally implies testimony, these poetic practices complicate that notion by foregrounding fragmentation, mediation, and ambiguity. Rather than offering transparent accounts, they reveal the tensions between voice and silence, visibility and erasure.
This panel engages with and contributes to several areas of existing scholarship, including trauma studies, feminist theory, labor studies, and Sinophone literary studies. Recent work has emphasized the ethics of witnessing, the politics of representation, and the role of affect in mediating historical experience. At the same time, scholarship on contemporary Chinese poetry has increasingly turned toward questions of marginality, embodiment, and social engagement. Yet the relationship between poetic form and embodied witness remains insufficiently theorized. By bringing together studies of migrant worker poetry, feminist writing, Indigenous expression, and poetic responses to contemporary events, this panel seeks to interrogate how poetry operates as a medium of both testimony and critique.
If we are to understand poetry as a form of witnessing, it becomes necessary to ask what kind of witness poetry can be. Does poetic language amplify marginalized voices, or does it risk aestheticizing suffering? How do formal strategies, such as fragmentation, metaphor, or repetition, mediate the relationship between experience and representation? And to what extent can poetry intervene in broader social and political discourses, rather than merely reflecting them?
The panelists approach these questions from complementary perspectives. Celia Yinzhi Xu examines poetic responses to the widely circulated case of the “chained woman,” arguing that different poetic strategies reveal both the possibilities and limitations of poetry as social intervention. While some approaches foreground individual suffering, others risk abstraction, raising questions about the ethics of representation and the role of poetic form in mediating atrocity.
Hanrui Chen focuses on Zheng Xiaoqiong’s poetry of female migrant workers, analyzing how bodily imagery, particularly the notion of “shame,” becomes a site of both oppression and resistance. By foregrounding the physical and emotional toll of labor, Zheng’s work reconfigures the female body as a terrain of solidarity and collective articulation.
Fay Zhen examines how contemporary Chinese poetry renders life through the intertwined conditions of labor and environment, focusing on poets such as Zheng Xiaoqiong and Xu Lizhi. Through images of bodily exhaustion and industrial transformation, these works make visible forms of life shaped by globalization and ecological change.
Justyna Jaguścik turns to Indigenous Taiwanese poetry, exploring how writing functions as a means of reclaiming identity and voice under conditions of historical marginalization. Through linguistic and formal experimentation, these poets articulate both the fragmentation and reconstruction of cultural identity.
Taken together, these papers suggest that embodied witness in contemporary Chinese poetry is not a unified or transparent practice, but a complex process shaped by form, context, and mediation. By attending to marginalized voices across different social and cultural locations, the panel highlights both the possibilities and the limits of poetry as a mode of witnessing.
The session will consist of four presentations of no more than 15 minutes each, allowing time for transitions and ensuring at least 15 minutes of unstructured discussion with the audience.