Cultural Production and Representations of Identity: Questioning Chineseness in the Sino-Italian Context

Cultural production is crucial to the process of identity construction and expression for ethnic minorities around the world. In the case of people of Chinese heritage living in Europe, while other contexts of identity formation have been researched extensively (such as education, family, and work), the creative expressions of Chinese Europeans have not yet been the object of a thorough and systematic cultural analysis. In this chapter, after reviewing the global debate on the definition of Chineseness among communities overseas, I move on to sketch the landscape of cultural production by people of Chinese origin who arrived in Italy as adults. I show that the theme of dialectical confrontation between Italian and Chinese cultures is present in the majority of these creative works. The last part of the chapter analyses and critiques the theme of Chineseness, based on interviews with a younger generation of artists, writers, and cultural activists of Chinese descent who grew up in Italy. Their voices present an array of nuanced positions on how they perceive their cultural identity and what role it plays in their creative expressions, offering a glimpse of the future of Sino-Italian cultural production.