Quel che resta della “notte nera”: analisi di alcuni versi del collettivo “Le Flâneuse”

This study attempts to explore the poetics of “The Flâneuses” (Chengshi manyouzhe 城市漫游者) poetry collective by placing it within the interpretative framework of contemporary Chinese “women’s poetry” (nüxing shige 女性诗歌). The group, formed by seven women poets born in the 1990s, was founded in Shanghai in 2016 and may be the first all-female poetry collective with permanent members, its own manifesto, and socio-poetic purpose in the history of contemporary Chinese poetry. After providing the reader a working definition of contemporary Chinese women’s poetry as a critical category, which is partly based on Jeanne Hong Zhang’s (2004) ground-breaking work on the topic, I will try to demonstrate how these young poets rethink and re-enact the legacy of women’s writing from the late 1980s, wondering if they can or cannot be regarded as heirs of this female literary tradition. To do so, I will use close reading techniques to conduct a critical analysis of the “night” and the “mirror” images as implied in their poems, two major topoi of this discourse, to grasp how the collective reinterprets these metaphors, if at all, and what kind of literary strategies of subjectification and self-affirmation are adopted in their works. Throughout this paper I will base my considerations on the concept of identity as a process in which the poets define themselves in the very act of writing, liberated and liberating themselves from any kind of imposed male-based norms using a language of “one’s own”.