LRCCS Noon Lecture Series | Chinese Espresso: A Story of Global China in Italy’s Local Coffee Bars

Please note: This lecture will be held in person and virtually on Zoom. The webinar is free and open to the public, but registration is required. Once you've registered, https://myumi.ch/79Dp1

What happens when Italy’s most “sacred” daily ritual, an espresso at a coffee bar, is increasingly performed not by Italians but by Chinese migrants? Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in Bologna, this talk examines how racialized Chinese migrants preserve this distinctive Italian social and cultural tradition by deploying local knowledge and taste, often gleaned from longtime residents who have come, sometimes resentfully, to regard this arrangement as a new normal. In particular, it highlights how diasporic Chinese entrepreneurs both reproduce Italy's existing racial hierarchies while also forming their own racial categories and understandings that mirror China’s growing geopolitical and economic power.

Grazia Deng is a research scholar at Brandeis University. As a sociocultural anthropologist, she studies global China through the lenses of migration, race, and global capitalism. She is the author of the book Chinese Espresso: Contested Race and Convivial Space in Contemporary Italy (Princeton University Press, 2024), which is shortlisted for the Gourmand Book Award. She is now working on a new project on Chinese-led racial capitalism in the Made-in-Italy fashion industry.