Grazia Ting Deng, Chinese Espresso: Contested Race and Convivial Space in Contemporary Italy, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2024.

内容简介

Italians regard espresso as a quintessentially Italian cultural product—so much so that Italy has applied to add Italian espresso to UNESCO’s official list of intangible heritages of humanity. The coffee bar is a cornerstone of Italian urban life, with city residents sipping espresso at more than 100,000 of these local businesses throughout the country. And yet, despite its nationalist bona fides, espresso in Italy is increasingly prepared by Chinese baristas in Chinese-managed coffee bars. In this book, Grazia Ting Deng explores the paradox of “Chinese espresso”—the fact that this most distinctive Italian social and cultural tradition is being preserved by Chinese immigrants and their racially diverse clientele.

Deng investigates the conditions, mechanisms, and implications of the rapid spread of Chinese-owned coffee bars in Italy since the Great Recession of 2008. Drawing on her extensive ethnographic research in Bologna, Deng describes an immigrant group that relies on reciprocal and flexible family labor to make coffee, deploying local knowledge gleaned from longtime residents who have come, sometimes resentfully, to regard this arrangement as a new normal. The existence of Chinese espresso represents new features of postmodern and postcolonial urban life in a pluralistic society where immigrants assume traditional roles even as they are regarded as racial others. The story of Chinese baristas and their patrons, Deng argues, transcends the dominant Eurocentric narrative of immigrant-host relations, complicating our understanding of cultural dynamics and racial formation within the shifting demographic realities of the Global North.

意大利人视浓缩咖啡为典型的意大利文化产物——如此重要，以至于意大利已申请将意式浓缩咖啡列入联合国教科文组织非物质文化遗产名录。咖啡馆是意大利城市生活的基石，全国各地超过10万家此类本土商户为城市居民提供浓缩咖啡。然而，尽管具有如此鲜明的民族特色，如今意大利的浓缩咖啡却越来越多地由华裔咖啡师在华人经营的咖啡馆中制作。在本书中，邓婷探讨了”中国式浓缩咖啡”这一悖论现象——这一最具特色的意大利社会文化传统正在由中国移民及其种族多元化的顾客群体所传承。

邓婷研究了2008年金融危机以来，意大利华人咖啡馆快速扩张的条件、机制及其影响。基于在博洛尼亚的深入田野调查，邓婷描述了一个依靠互惠灵活的家庭劳动力制作咖啡的移民群体，他们运用从当地居民处习得的本土知识，而这些居民也逐渐（有时是不情愿地）将这种安排视为一种新常态。“中国式浓缩咖啡”的存在体现了后现代与后殖民城市生活在多元社会中的新特征，在这里，移民群体虽被视为种族他者，却承担着传统角色。邓婷认为，华裔咖啡师与其顾客的故事超越了主流的欧洲中心主义移民-东道主关系叙事，使我们对全球北方不断变迁的人口现实中的文化动态与种族形成有了更复杂的理解。

评论

An exciting new ethnography of Italy that centers on espresso coffee—a nationalist commodity—to interpret changing racial dynamics and immigration patterns in the country.

—Lilith Mahmud, University of California, Irvine

Deng paints a nuanced portrait of an immigrant community that learns, adapts, and comes to deploy local knowledge gleaned from local Italian residents, earning both their admiration and resentment.

—Elizabeth Krause, University of Massachusetts Amherst

这是一部令人振奋的意大利新民族志研究，以浓缩咖啡这一民族象征性商品为中心，诠释了该国不断变化的种族动态与移民模式。

——莉莉丝·马哈茂德，加州大学欧文分校

邓婷细腻地刻画了一个移民社群如何学习、适应并运用从意大利当地居民处习得的本土知识，既赢得他们的赞赏，也招致怨恨。

——伊丽莎白·克劳斯，马萨诸塞大学阿默斯特分校

作者简介

Grazia Ting Deng is a European Commission Marie Curie Fellow at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice and a former postdoctoral research associate at Brown University’s Population Studies and Training Center. She received her PhD in anthropology from the Chinese University of Hong Kong.

邓婷现为威尼斯大学卡福斯卡里分校欧盟玛丽·居里学者，曾任布朗大学人口研究与培训中心博士后研究员。她获香港中文大学人类学博士学位。

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