Title: Witness, Voice, and Agency: Chinese Poetry as Emancipatory Narrative

This panel explores how Chinese poetry, from classical to contemporary, functions as emancipatory narrative across historical periods, aesthetic forms, and sociopolitical contexts.

We welcome papers that examine how poets articulate conditions of constraint while imagining, inhabiting, or enacting liberatory possibilities. Possible topics include, but are not limited to: 

• lyric constructions of poetic freedom and transcendence; 
• witness-poetics as ethical description and moral agency; 
• poets’ linguistic resistance to ideological control; 
• labor and migrant poetry as classed self-representation; 
• feminist interventions in modern Chinese poetry; 
• and formal innovations that transform poetic structure into sites of agency. 
• Comparative, transnational, translation-based, theoretical, and historically grounded approaches are especially encouraged.

How does poetry preserve “the painful details” of historical experience while transforming them into aesthetic and communal expression? In what ways do poetic voice, form, and circulation create spaces of articulation for marginalized subjects? By placing Chinese poetic traditions in dialogue with the convention’s theme, this session aims to foreground poetry as both descriptive witness and agential intervention.

Keywords:

Chinese poetry; emancipatory narratives; lyric agency; transnational poetics

Please send proposals of approximately 300-words (title and abstract) and short bios to Fay Zhen <fzhen2@asu.edu> by Monday, March 23.

Contact Information

Fay Zhen

Contact Email: fzhen2@asu.edu