Beyond the Overlooked Rural Narrative in Chinese Migrant Worker Literature: On Liang Hong’s and Sun Huifen’s works
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28 mars 2024
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Mots-clés
migrant workers Chinese literature rurality structure of feeling subaltern cultural productionSujets proches
Labor, Migrant Migrants (Migrant labor) Transient labor Migratory workers Migrant workersCiter ce document
Shuang Liu, « Beyond the Overlooked Rural Narrative in Chinese Migrant Worker Literature: On Liang Hong’s and Sun Huifen’s works », China Perspectives, ID : 10.4000/chinaperspectives.16508
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Résumé
The focus of literary works about Chinese rural-to-urban migrant workers is often on their urban experience, in which they are mostly portrayed as a socially disadvantaged group and a deviant presence in urban life. The reader less frequently encounters a complementary rural narrative on migrant workers’ experience of their native countryside. This is remarkable, since the countryside holds demonstrable importance for migrant workers, and studying the associated rural narrative is essential for understanding the intricacies and diversity of the migrant worker experience as a whole. By closely reading two literary texts, Liang Hong’s nonfictional China in One Village: The Story of One Town and the Changing World (2010), and Sun Huifen’s novel Jikuan’s Carriage (2007), this paper shows the complex connection between migrant workers and the countryside, adding a key element to our understanding of this much discussed demographic, its literary representations, and of subaltern cultural production in general.