I cinesi among others: the contested racial perceptions among Chinese migrants in Italy

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article examines the vernacular system of racial designations and perceptions deployed by Chinese migrants in Italy for making sense of the pluralistic and hierarchical racial reality in which they live. Data primarily came from 14 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Bologna from 2014 to 2015 and the subsequent annual visits until the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. Focusing on three major racial labels, it sheds light on the ways in which Chinese diasporic subjects produce a racialized vocabulary related to racism and practice racial formations in transnational contexts. Their localised racial ideology reflects their predicament of being simultaneously both socially vulnerable and economically privileged. It paradoxically both reproduces and negotiates the preexisting Italian racial hierarchy that also reflects globally circulating racial hierarchies, while intersecting with their own understandings of civility and modernity. The perspectives of Chinese migrants who, themselves subject to racialisation, also racialise others reveal a contested bottom-up narrative of racial formation in a European society experiencing rapid demographic change. This ethnographic study thus challenges the existing narratives of racialisation and immigration beyond Eurocentric frameworks.