ABSTRACT
Battler poetry (dagong shige), often called migrant worker poetry in English, is writing by precarious workers in postsocialist China that addresses their socioeconomic experience. It speaks to a wide-ranging audience that includes the authors’ fellow workers but also cultural officials, middle-class media consumers, labor activists, and scholars and translators, in China and elsewhere. Battler poetry raises questions that lie at the nexus of social experience and aesthetics. As such, it invites interdisciplinary work at the interface of social science and the humanities. Scholarship on battler poetry to date is dominated by paraphrastic and interpretive approaches. To complement these approaches, this chapter proposes an ontological approach that recognizes battler poetry as not just documentation or artifact but as partaking of poetic voice, a fundamental expression of humanity whose manifestations are remarkably diverse.
