Chinese Espresso and Everyday Conviviality in Italy: A Conversation with Grazia Ting Deng

On April 16 Martina Bofulin organized an online event hosted by the CHERN (China in Europe Network) Working Group on Migration and Labour. The event began with a short presentation of the book Chinese Espresso: Contested Race & Convivial Space in Contemporary Italy (Princeton University Press, 2024) by author Grazia Ting Deng, and was followed by a conversation between the author and Martina Bofulin, and a live Q&A.

In her book, Chinese Espresso Grazia Ting Deng explores the surprising rise of “Chinese espresso” in Italy, where Chinese immigrants increasingly operate coffee bars serving Italy’s iconic espresso. Once a purely Italian tradition, espresso culture is now maintained by Chinese baristas using flexible family labor and local know-how. Deng’s ethnographic research in Bologna reveals how these immigrants have redefined social roles in a society that still sees them as outsiders. Their presence highlights broader shifts in postmodern, postcolonial urban life, offering a powerful example of how cultural traditions can evolve through unexpected agents of preservation and change.

Grazia is a lecturer in anthropology at Brandeis University. She received her doctoral degree from the Chinese University of Hong Kong and later served as a postdoctoral research associate at Brown University and a Marie Curie Fellow at University of Venice Ca’Foscari.Her research sits at the intersection of the Chinese diaspora and immigrant Italy, broadly exploring migration dynamics, race and ethnicity, health, urban conviviality, and global capitalism. 

The event was organized by CHERN in collaboration with ZRC SAZU (project Migrants’ emplacement at the micro-level: Restaurants as the contact zones funded by Slovenian Research Agency, J6-60098)