Rethinking the distance, reframing the exotic: Italian tales of Shanghai through the Republican and early Maoist eras

Abstract

In the twentieth century the experience that Italians could have of China was mainly mediated by words: for the most part, China existed in Italian minds thanks to travel literature and newspaper reports. The two were strictly linked: most travelogues were originally written for the daily or weekly press, and only later were some of them edited as books. A number of these works were illustrated, and in any case photojournalism—as news reels—offered visual information to the public; however, generally speaking, in Italy the image of China was mainly constructed by travel literature. Indeed, travel literature, with all its mannerisms and tropes, constituted an important component of Italian orientalism, whose place in Italian cultural history has recently become a topic of scholarly interest.1 From this perspective, the study of Italian viewpoints and cultural constructions of China in the Italian travelogues is particularly significant. Before the Second World War, as well as during the Cold War, China often served as a screen to project domestic hopes and fears. Up to 1943 it was a place of interest for the Italian colonial enterprise, thanks to the Tianjin Concession, and, given the international competition and rivalry among Western powers in the area, it constituted a significant arena where the national identity could be constructed in the collective imagery. Later, after 1949, China still represented a realm where the challenges constituted by modernization, industrialization, and mass society could be explored safely. So, Italy’s intellectual engagement with China highlights the many contradictions of the Italian representations of West and East.