Paper short abstract:

This paper focuses on how Chinese migrant entrepreneurs forge unique models of race making and negotiate racial hierarchy in their everyday management of coffee bars in Italy. It shows how their racial practices complicate the seemingly monolithic, top-down racial hierarchy of a postcolonial Europe.

Paper long abstract:

Neighborhood coffee bars have become a new business niche for many self-employed Chinese migrant entrepreneurs in Italy since the glooming economic downturn of the late 2000s. These coffee bars, serving as one of the main hubs of community socializing, are considered to be strictly associated with local identity and urban culture in Italy. They are also one of the few social spaces where marginalized social groups from various racial and ethnic backgrounds meet and interact with each other. The primary clientele in these coffee bars is often composed of retired working-class men, internal migrants, and transnational immigrants from North Africa, South Asia, and Eastern Europe. How do Chinese owners and baristas, who are often racialized as ethnic Others, react to the distrust and racism from the mainstream Italian society about their cultural competence in coffee bar management? And meanwhile, how do they deal with the complicated racial and ethnic composition of their clients?

Based on 14 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Bologna, this paper will focus on Chinese migrant entrepreneurs' unique models of race making in these particular social spaces. It will argue that their management strategies are themselves racial projects in which racial dynamics are interpreted and represented through particular racial lines that they perceive. Their racial consciousness constitutes a new system of racial perceptions and hierarchy, which is strongly affected by but at the same time divergent from both Italian public discourses of race and racism and the common racial understandings in China.