Presented by Dr. Gaoheng Zhang (Associate Professor of Italian), FHIS
Respondent: Dr. Anna Casas Aguilar (Associate Professor of Spanish), FHIS
About the talk:
Abstract: This presentation draws from my forthcoming book – Italian Dumplings and Chinese Pizzas: Transcultural Food Mobilities – to be published with Fordham University Press in 2025. During the 1980s, Chinese cuisine became the first non-European food widely available in Italy thanks to the widespread presence of Chinese eateries. Only American fast food, which established itself in Italy around the same time, enjoyed comparable popularity as a destination for Italians’ culinary tourism. Fast-forwarding to the late 2010s, local populations viewed Milan’s vibrant Chinese foodscape as enhancing the fashion capital’s cosmopolitanism. The larger context of this phenomenon is mass immigration to Italy which began in the 1980s, when Italy rapidly changed from an emigrant-sending to an immigrant-receiving country. Since then, the Chinese have remained the fourth largest migrant group in numbers.
In this talk, I first provide a historical overview of Chinese migrant-managed food entrepreneurship in Italy, using the 2003 SARS outbreak and the Covid-19 pandemic as two watershed moments. Then I analyze the depictions of Chinese food in Italy’s largest-circulating newspaper, Corriere della Sera, from the 1960s to the present day, showing how Italians’ Chinese culinary tourism in Milan interacted with Chinese American food culture in various stimulating ways. I want to understand why Chinese migrants’ cuisine was turned into “ethnic food” even when this food has had a longstanding and substantial presence within contemporary Italy’s foodscape.
View the Cultural Mobilities Between Italy and China website for supplementary materials to this talk.
Registration:
About the FHIS Research Seminar: Hosted by the Department of French, Hispanic and Italian Studies (FHIS), the Research Seminar is an opportunity to explore current research and ideas related to the languages, literatures and cultures of the Romance language-speaking world, with presentations from faculty members, graduate students, and/or guest speakers. All are welcome.
If you have questions, please contact Dr. Katharina Piechocki (katharina.piechocki@ubc.ca).
UBC Vancouver is situated on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territory of the xwməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam) People.
