Dr. Gaoheng Zhang, CES Affiliate and Associate Professor of Italian, has published two new monographs on the topics of food and fashion in Italy and China!
Italian Dumplings and Chinese Pizzas: Transcultural Food Mobilities
Zhang shows how China-Italy food mobilities relayed in popular culture helped forge Chinese and Italians’ socioeconomic identities in recent decades by fundamentally shaping contemporary Chinese and Italian consumer cultures. This book addresses China-Italy food cultures against the backdrops of two epoch-making socioeconomic processes. During the 1980s, Chinese cuisine became the first non-European food widely available in Italy, thanks to the widespread presence of Chinese eateries. Only American fast food, which established itself in Italy around the same time, enjoyed comparable popularity as a destination for Italian culinary tourism. Meanwhile, in the early 1990s, together with American hamburgers and fried chicken, the American food chain Pizza Hut’s pizzas and spaghetti were the first non-Asian foods that post-Mao Chinese customers recognized as “Western.” The book proposes a critical framework that analyzes transcultural food mobilities by seriously assessing the confluence of diverse mobilities and their impact on food cultures. Ultimately, the study shows that a sophisticated interpretation of transcultural food mobilities can help address alterity and build understanding in a world of increasing political and cultural polarization.
Fashion Communications Between Italy and China: Unfolding a Sartorial Relationship
In this in-depth study, author Gaoheng Zhang analyses the relationship between the Italian ready-to-wear fashion industry and the Chinese fast fashion industry, focussing on the 2000s and 2010s. Looking first at the communication of Italian fashion in China before examining the impact of Chinese migrants and Chinese fashion on the Italian fashion industry, the author unpacks perceived tensions between “made in China” fast fashion and “made in Italy” ready-to-wear that is viewed as “slow” fashion. In doing so, Zhang exposes the nuances, controversies and ambivalences of Italy’s and China’s intertwined fashion systems, revealing not only the competition between these two countries, but also their collaboration.
