‘Cin ciun cian’ (ching chong): Yellowness and neo-orientalism in Italy at the time of COVID-19

Toshio Miyake

doi:10.1177/01914537211011719

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has put in the foreground the dramatic actuality of global and local inequalities, undermining neo-liberal, communitarian, democratic or cosmopolitan projects of collective identity. In the light of intersecting inequalities such as class, race/ethnicity and gender, an explosion of Sinophobia, social stigma and physical attacks targeting people of East Asian and Southeast Asian appearance or heritage has been widely reported in Euro-American media. This article will focus on the case of Italy during the initial stage of the pandemic in early 2020. Italy has not only been the first European country to be exposed to the pandemic and to undergo national lockdown but also a country where the wave of racist assaults started in late January 2020, even before the first clusters have been detected. The critical investigation of Italian media discourses will highlight how deep-rooted, colonialist and ambivalent assumptions about the ‘Oriental’, ‘Asian’, ‘Chinese’ and ‘yellow’ other may have been crucial to the reproduction of racism against specific people, cultures and civilizations, regardless of nationality, class and gender. It will refer in particular to the concept of ‘yellowness’, resulting from a process of bio-cultural racialization within the hegemonic frame of ‘Western’, ‘White’ or ‘Italian’ identity. Furthermore, it will indicate how this process of racialized othering has emerged, but has also been contested, within the specific context of citizenship, Asian immigrants and governmental actions in contemporary Italy. The overall aim is not so much to denounce higher levels of racism in Italy compared to other Euro-American countries; rather, this article refers to the Italian case to stress how both global and local trajectories do mutually overlap to shape, and eventually to transform, a national context, offering further insights on the glo-calization of the civilizational ‘West’/’East’ divide in the 21st century.

Highlights

Pandemic inequalitiesThe ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has induced very different individual, collective or national ways of coping with the global emergency
According to the Pew Research Center (PRC), almost 4 in 10 Asian Americans have declared that racist views against them have become more common than before COVID-19 (PRC 2020)
Stop AAPI Hate (2021), a non-profit organization established in California in response to racist attacks against Asian Americans and Asian Pacific Islanders, has reported 3795 incidents in the period from 19 March 2020 to 28 February 2021, with women being 2.3 times more targeted than men

Summary

Introduction

The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has induced very different individual, collective or national ways of coping with the global emergency. This means that most of the growing number of second-generation immigrants don’t have automatically the right to Italian citizenship, even if they were born in Italy, have become literate in Italian language and may have never lived in the country of origin of their parents or do not speak their language This further contributes to enhance essentialist conceptions in respect to the otherness of the Chinese, Asian or ‘Oriental’ ‘non-communitarian’ (i.e. their non-Italianness). The PRC sent to Italy a team of nine medical staff together with tons of medical supplies (face masks, protective suits, artificial respirators).66 This link between the PRC, companies and the coordination of local communities in handling both the sanitary and racist emergency has contributed to gradually shift public perception and prejudice of the Chinese, labelled as the origin and contagious infector of COVID-19, to the image of the victim, or even of an efficient and helpful agent to contrast the pandemic. It was the first G7 country to formally join the Belt and Road Initiative, arguably the most ambitious infrastructure and investment plan in human history and which has become the symbol of the RPC’s increasing global hegemony

Conclusion

Findings

24. Ixé survey on 25 February 2020