Cultural Mobilities Between Italy and China, Palgrave MacMillan, 2023

Zhang Gaoheng and Valentina Pedone (eds.) Cultural Mobilities Between China and Italy New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2023, 263 Pp.

What is the difference between travel and mobility and how this conceptual dichotomy can help us re-interpreting the nexus of relations linking Italy and China at the dawn of the third millennium? This is one among the many productive questions raised by Zhang Gaoheng and Valentina Pedone in Cultural Mobilities Between China and Italy. The book gathers a broad mosaic of analyses and critical forays and brings a much welcomed contribution both to a burgeoning debate on Sino-Italian interconnections and to a vital network of collaborations encompassing Italian, Chinese and North American academia. Sustained by a rigorous theoretical argumentation, the editors engage with a broad spectrum of scholarship in China/Italy contacts in order to refashion critical methodologies drawn from sociological analysis and literary inquiry: this critical framework is reassessed in the light of a “mobility paradigm” mindful of the “the increasingly significant role of mobilities in contemporary lives and societies, ranging from large-scale movements of people, objects, capital and information to the “local process” of daily interactions, “transportation and travel of material things” (10).

Building on Stephen Greeblatt’s Manifesto (Cultural Mobility: a Manifesto, Cambridge University Press, 2010), Zhang and Pedone thus productively inject such “mobility turn” into critical debates on Sino-Italian exchanges. Cultural Mobilities Between China and Italy guides us into a critical exploration of three major articulations in China-Italy interactions across a long 20th century. The first historical “constellation” centers on the 1920s-1930s, when the repercussions of the Boxer rebellion and the concurrent establishment of the Italian concession in Tianjin (1901), along with the echoes of European imperialism in China and the epochal changes brought by the downfall of the Qing empire, intertwined with the Fascist foreign policy and rhetoric. A second crucial juncture encompasses the 1950s-1970s when, in a context of growing Cold War divides, cultural links between Italy and China were mediated primarily by official “delegations” of left-wing intellectuals that reflected both the postwar influence of the Italian Communist Party and a political agenda pursued by Maoist China to showcase its “socialist engineering” to Westerners (7). Finally, a last period scrutinized in the book pivots on more recent years when, in the wake of globalization and Deng Xiaoping’s reform and opening up, “two way migration became a key mobility form for the first time in China-Italy history” (8). This phase culminated in the opposing dynamics of “blockage and circulation” triggered by the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 – another fundamental turning point that further exposed the links between Sino-Italian exchanges and a larger scenario of 21st century global mobilities (9).

Following this theoretical and chronological structure, the first three chapters of the volume investigate literary narratives of Sino-Italian encounters in the first half of the 20th century. Linetto Basilone’s opening contribution, “Cultural Routes, Italian Identities, and Mobility Systems: Italian Intellectuals and Their Images of China (1898–1956)” (37-60), re-reads some of the key modern Italian travel narratives about China in the light of “three consecutive time frames linking three specific cultural routes, three transnational power dynamics, and three images of China”: the first situated between the late 19th and early 20th century, marked by long journeys on transoceanic liners and memories of the colonial period, the second was shaped by the post-WWI geopolitical order and the emergence of totalitarianisms and the third, going from 1949 until 1956, developed from the proclamation of the PRC to the crisis of the Italian PCI following the 20th congress of the CPSU and the first preludes of the Sino-Soviet split. In that period, Basilone notes, the emergence of the airplane as a new means of transportation not only changed ideas “of proximity and distance”, but also reflected an “idea of China as suddenly ‘close at hand’ ” – how not to think about Marco Bellocchio’s eponymous film, La Cina è vicina (1967) – that was part of a “structured discourse on the importance of the ‘making’ of the PRC led by Mao” (53). The following contributions by Miriam Castorina (“The Journey and Narrative Memory: Mapping Mobilities Through Twentieth-Century Chinese Travel Notes on Italy”, 61-88) and Alessandra Brezzi (“China–Italy Mobility and Travel Writing: Sheng Cheng and Lü Bicheng’s Narratives about 1920s Italy”, 89-110) provide an useful and interesting critical counterpoint, focusing on Chinese travel narratives to early 20th century Italy, and offer both an extremely useful bibliographical overview of 游记, “travel notes” and travelogues written by Chinese authors visiting Italy in the course of the 20th century, carefully mapped by Castorina and, on the other hand, a close reading of Shen Cheng’s Traces from Italy (Yiguo liuzong ji 意国留踪记, 1937) and those sections of Lü Bicheng’s Wandering in Europe and America (Ou Mei manyou lu 欧美漫游录, 1928) devoted to Italian culture and cities.

Zhang Gaoheng’s chapter, “Mobility, Architecture, Chronotopes: 1930s Colonialism and Tourist Consumerism in Tianjin’s Italian Concession” (111-134), investigates the interplay between architecture and migration by focusing on the most renowned example of Italian colonial architecture in Asia, the Tianjin concession. Surveying a plurality of Italian and Chinese sources – documents from the Archivio Storico Diplomatico, newsreels from the Istituto Luce, Chinese news outles such as the dailies Ta-Kung-Pao 大公报 and Beiyang Shubao 北洋畫報 – Zhang analyzes the interplay of “Italian colonialism and Chinese tourist consumerism” that permeated the urban landscape of the Tianjin concession, an interplay still visible today in the former urban landscapes of the concession (112).

Contributions by Yang Wang and Martina Tanga (“Representations of Socialist Mobility in Post-WWII China-Italy Cultural Exchange”, 135-170) and Xin Liu (“Italian Travelogues on Maoist China (1950s–1970s) through the Lens of Mobilities Studies” 171-200) delve into one of the best known examples of Sino-Italian cultural contacts in the 20th century: the organization of two Italian cultural delegations to China in the mid-1950s led respectively by Piero Calamandrei in 1955, with the participation among others of Franco Fortini, Norberto Bobbio, Carlo Cassola and Carlo Bernari, and by sculptor Antonietta Raphäel and painter Aligi Sassu in 1956. In their analysis, Wang and Tanga expose the “clear political agenda” that these two delegations “projected onto China” to advocate for a “greater understanding of, and interaction with, the new communist China” (139) against the background of a “strident official positions of the Italian government against Communist China” (140). Xin Liu, on the other hand, critically engages with Paul Hollander’s acclaimed book Political Pilgrims: Western Intellectuals in Search of the Good Society (New York: Harper, 1981) and its influent polemical argument, where Hollander scrutinized left-wing Western authors for their purported tendency to fabricate artificially “positive images” of communist countries infuse with ideological and political convenience (171). Liu aptly juxtaposes Hollander’s “political pilgrimages” vis à vis a different “mobility-focused” interpretive framework, able to highlight nuances and complexities in the “Italian left-wing intellectuals’ collective response to China” (174). The result of this analysis shows how “Italian visitors in the mid-1950s experienced relatively higher spatial, cultural and information mobility” than Hollander’s perspective seems to advocate and indicate, as a telling example of such mixed and complex perspective, the “negative response” offered by Italian intellectuals “to the PRC during the Cultural Revolution” and stemming from a scenario of “hindered journeys, close surveillance, and strict censorship” (197) of which Italy’s “political pilgrims” were keenly aware (as reflected for instance in Antonioni’s Chung Kuo, Cina, 1972).

The concluding contributions in the volume by Valentina Pedone (“The Location of “Chineseness”: Cultural Production and Contemporary Mobility from China to Italy”, 201-203) and Chiara Giuliani (“Italian Migration to China, Contemporary Movements, Self-Representations and Practices”, 231-254) shift the focus on contemporary migratory patterns and their cultural representations. Pedone offers a compelling analysis of three woks by “Sino-Italian authors” – the “semi-autobiografical novel” Colorful Roma / 缤纷罗马 authored by Li Shuman (2002), the corto Where the Leaves Fall by Alessandro Xin Zheng (2020) and Cristina’s Journey, a project by the Bologna-based collective WUXU – in order to retrace reflections and narrative surrounding the notion of “Chineseness” articulated by these authors precisely though and as a result of their moving physically away from China. “Without mobility in the first place”, Pedone remarks, “there would not be such attention to Chineseness as a social and cultural construct” (204). Finally Chiara Giuliani proposes an extremely innovative survey of “self-representations”, recently produced by Italian migrants to China ranging from “from novels to autofictional accounts, collections of interviews and blog posts, and memoirs” (233). This innovative analysis, surveying a hitherto largely unexplored corpus of texts and accounts of Italians in China, provides a fitting conclusion to an extremely innovative volume in the field of Sino-Italian studies.

Tommaso Pepe, Guangzhou Maritime University