衣食住行 (clothing,food,residence,and mobility) in scholarly practices of Transnational Italian Studies

When explaining the seemingly disparate subjects that my current scholarly work addresses, I often find myself resorting to the Chinese expression 衣食住行 (yi shi zhu xing, or clothing, food, residence, and mobility). To those well-versed in the Chinese cultural tradition, this proverb appeals to intense emotions about the basic needs of human life. Chinese people born and raised in the country would immediately relate to the apparent truth of the expression. In my experience, those who study Chinese history and culture often recognize its significance in everyday discourse and appreciate it. My interlocutors who are from outside of this cultural sphere, however, often think that the combination of the four elements is somewhat arbitrary. Would health care also be fundamental to one's wellbeing? Would a good night's sleep be also necessary to promote our sense of comfort?

My position paper is not meant to argue for the profundity of the proverb, or the lack thereof. I hope to briefly explain what 衣食住行 entails, how I use it to broadly frame my current scholarship, what this practice means in relation to my idea of Transnational Italian Studies, the trajectory through which I came to use it, and the potential conceptual problems it may pose. Above all, I want to show that my adoption of 衣食住行 as an organizing principle for my current intellectual project entails some decolonizing of the conventions of Italian Studies. Decolonizing and diversifying of the discipline aptly captures some of the recent developments in the collective endeavor of Transnational Italian Studies (Brioni et al., 2022).

The 1936 (and first) edition of 辞海 (Ci Hai), the standard dictionary and encyclopedia of modern Mandarin Chinese, provides an etymological explanation for 衣食住行:

衣服飲食居住三者，為人生所必須，故舊時恆三者連舉；自世界進化，交通頻繁，孫中山先生始倡為衣食住行之說；蓋於吾人最關切者，此四事也。

The idea behind the Chinese formulation, minus mobility, is of ancient origin. It appears, for example, in the Taoist text 道德經 (Dao De Jing, or Tao Te Ching, 4th century BCE) by 老子 Laozi. In Chapter 80, food, clothing, dwellings, and customs are mentioned in a single sentence about how to enjoy the simple things in life. ² In the classic text 論語 (Lun Yu, or The Analects, 5th century BCE), 孔子 Confucius embeds this idea in many passages, albeit not in a concentrated way. Through this use, the philosopher sheds light on the cultural, political, and moral reasons why these four things and their extended meanings recur in people's thoughts about their life (Wu, 2006). Ancient Chinese Buddhism also had a well-developed system for regulating the four daily activities within the context of temple life (Putizi, 2004).

The modern popularization of 衣食住行 was attributed to Dr Sun Yat-sen in the early 20th century. He formulated 三民主义 (San Min Zhuyi), or Three Principles of the People, which is both a general practical guideline and a political philosophy for creating a Chinese nation-state. One tenet refers to 民生 (Minsheng), or people's welfare or livelihood, which for Dr Sun can refer to these four areas of human existence. In the aforementioned Ci Hai quote, as modernity and 交通 (jiaotong, or traffic, transportation, exchanges) are used together to contextualize the multivalent word 行 (xing), we are led to understand 行 as mobility that promotes communications and understandings across geographical distances (Kwok, 2005).

衣食住行 is not a theory and may at best be described as a Chinese philosophy of life. There is a broad range of Chinese-language popular literature that uses the expression as an organizing principle to frame its narratives, which may be a famous person's biography, the customs of a foreign place and people, or investigations into ancient societies. The partial adoption of this frame in recent academic studies written in both Chinese and western languages about material culture in China is also notable. Examples include 孙机 Sun Ji's (2014) important volume on ancient Chinese material culture, and Frank Dikötter's (2007) exhaustive volume about modern China's material culture and everyday life. This scholarly practice sets precedence for my use of 衣食住行 in framing my material cultural studies of sartorial, culinary, architectural, and mobility dimensions of Italian-Chinese cultural exchanges through a global lens.

Tentatively titled Chinese Recipes, Italian Designs, American Resonances: Food and Fashion through Migration and Tourism, 1980s–2010s, my forthcoming book addresses food and fashion cultures that are made through migration and tourism. I examine cultural representations and dynamics pertaining to food and fashion mobilities between China and Italy that migrants and tourists helped to initiate or deepen between the 1980s and 2010s. My analysis explains the circulation, meanings, and impact of Italian, Chinese, and American public communications about culinary and sartorial arts. Thus the book foregrounds the role of material culture in the study of transnational Italian mobilities. Moreover, I have worked on two upcoming book chapters concerning Italian-Chinese architectural and urban cultures. Drawing from Italian and Chinese historical archives, one contribution interprets architectural narratives and newspaper advertising of a commercial facility within the context of 1930s Tianjin's Italian concession. The chapter seeks to clarify the discourses of Italian colonialism and Chinese consumerist tourism that these texts reveal. The other piece provides a detailed study of some of the most iconic contemporary imitations of Venice on Chinese soil, most of which denote Chinese developmentalism and American neocolonialism. In these planned publications, my interest in multiple and intersecting cultural mobilities is evident. I have also consolidated my thinking on this subject by authoring an article to be included in a Modern Language Association volume on teaching migration through teaching literature, cinema, and the media. This contribution seeks to make explicit the ways in which my undergraduate and graduate courses engage mobilities theories and methodologies in teaching interpretive approaches to texts about migration.

Insofar as I use western theories and thoughts in my publications for detailed analyses, I regard the Chinese-origin organizational framework 衣食住行 as my contribution toward fostering a partnership of knowledge creation. In most of my scholarly contributions, I practice a dialogical methodology in which I analyze both Italian and Chinese perspectives on debatable issues whenever necessary. For example, in Chinese Recipes, Italian Designs, American Resonances, I juxtapose contradictory perspectives on the impact and meanings of fashion eco-sustainability, which often coalesce into supposedly Italian and Chinese standpoints. However, the substantive arguments and the interpretive frameworks that I advance in the book ultimately refer to English-language scholarship. Thus I hope that the 衣食住行 frame will embed a Chinese thought process within this book and my other publications, so that my overall scholarly output can take on a distinctive look not only in terms of scholarly designs but also in an epistemological sense.

This last concern takes me to a discussion of the multiple routes through which I came to adopt this frame. This narrative will help further contextualize my current analytical and interpretive practices in Transnational Italian Studies. I had an overall desire to write about mobilities in interaction with migration. The idea began when I was in Los Angeles researching my first book, but it matured during my participation in a research group when teaching at the University of Toronto. I studied architecture and urban design on my own for years as a hobby, and I went on study trips to many sites in the Americas, Europe, and China. Through the process, I had accumulated considerable knowledge of Venetian-themed and Italian-style architecture in China and in the United States. Because my hometown, Hangzhou, is prominently featured in Marco Polo's travelogue, the focus on Venice also seemed natural to me. When organizing a conference on Italy and East Asia at Stony Brook University, a keynote speaker was suggested to me who worked on Italian and Italian-style food in North and South America. Then I found a matching keynote speaker to lecture on Chinese food in the United States. My research on Chinese migrant cuisine in Italy began when the latter speaker invited me to deliver an undergraduate lecture on the topic at the University of California at Irvine. Already in my previous book, Migration and the Media (Zhang, 2019), I had written on Chinese-managed fast fashion in Italy, focusing on media debates surrounding this phenomenon. But I did not view the analysis as part of material culture until a panel speaker taking part in the book launch held at my institution, in Vancouver, said so in her paper. I then reprised and perfected these talks on Chinese migrant fashion and cuisine at the University of Florence.

After the four parts came together, prompting me to think about adopting the Chinese expression as an organizing principle, two other events caused me to view it as a decolonizing methodology in the context of Chinese-Italian migrations and cultures. At the University of British Columbia, where I work, the Centre for Migration Studies sponsors several research groups, including one focused on indigeneity. By way of my involvement in the Centre, I became aware of the debates on decolonization in relation to settler colonialism, indigenous peoples’ land dispossession and sovereignty, and reconciliation and indigenous futurity in Canada. I knew almost nothing about these topics prior to my settlement here, but now I understand that they constitute the material context of what we know as decolonization. Meanwhile, other social justice issues, which are related to decolonization in more metaphorical ways (Tuck and Yang, 2012), became pressing for me. A group of Italian Studies scholars from the United States invited me to join a team that convened a series of roundtables concerning decolonizing, diversity, and Italian Studies. They introduced me to recent scholarship originating from South Africa and elsewhere about decolonization in universities, which seemed a fitting frame for my scholarship and teaching in Italian Studies.

Thus, a confluence of global and local factors, and academic and personal interests, brought me to adopt 衣食住行, which is one way of conceiving this partnership of knowledge creation. I hope that this brief account can help allay the reader's misgivings regarding potential implications of cultural essentialism, which a conscious deployment of Chinese and other postcolonial “native” cultural concepts might engender. As Kuan-Hsing Chen (1998: 1) warns us, “nationalism, nativism, and civilizationalism” emerged strongly during decolonization in postcolonial Asia. As Chen (1998: 14) discusses in relation to nativism, for example, both “the colonialist category of the East and West” and “Confucianism, the Culture of the Continent vs the Culture of the Sea” are examples of the “foundational, if not fundamentalist, drive of nativism” which feeds on essentialist differences. I do not intend to use 衣食住行, or other Chinese terms and concepts, to simply dress up arguments. My scholarly publications are anchored in North American and European intellectual milieus. However, for me, the act of framing my current scholarship through this Chinese notion is a necessary step toward future undertaking of knowledge co-production on subjects that concern mobility, alterity, and culture in Transnational Italian Studies.