Espresso and Ethnicity: Cultural Conversations

Think you know “coffee culture”? Anthropologist Grazia Ting Deng discusses her research into the “paradox of Chinese Espresso” – or why and how coffee bars in Italy, seen as such distinctively “Italian” spaces, became increasingly managed by Chinese baristas since 2008. Grazia tells Rosie and guest host Amit Singh – who highlights the overlap with his own co-authored research into the UK’s desi pubs – about her ethnographic study and how she even trained as a barista to better grasp her subject. Painting a vivid picture of how management by Chinese baristas grew due to economic, social and cultural factors in Bologna, Italy, she describes how and why these baristas have typically preserved rather than altered the culture in place. The coffee bar, she shows, is an everyday site of friction and adaptation where diverse groups come together and interact to construct a convivial space. Crucially, Grazia argues, conviviality is not some lofty goal – as is often thought to be the case – rather, it’s a lived reality, characterised by contingency and compromise.

Guest: Grazia Ting Deng
Hosts: Rosie Hancock, Amit Singh
Executive Producer: Alice Bloch
Sound Engineer: David Crackles
Music: Joe Gardner
Artwork: Erin Aniker

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Episode Resources

By Grazia Ting Deng

• Chinese Espresso
• Hopefully a Good Life
• I Cinesi among Others: The Contested Racial Perceptions among Chinese Migrants in Italy

Discussed by Rosie, Amit and Grazia

• “Heaven’s Kitchen” – Courtney Bender
• “In Search of Respect” – Philippe Bourgois
• “Challenging Codes” – Alberto Melucci
• “New Ethnicities and Urban Culture” – Les Back
• “Coffee and Cigarettes” – film, dir. Jim Jarmusch
• “Shun Li and the Poet” – film, dir. Andrea Segre

From The Sociological Review

• Social spaces and non-places: The community role of the traditional British pub – Reid Allen
• Convivial narratives as agency: Middle-class Muslims evading racialisation in Copenhagen – Amani Hassani
• Valuing the bowling alley: Contestations over the preservation of spaces of everyday urban multiculture in London – Emma Jackson

Further reading

• “The Great Good Place” – Ray Oldenburg
• A pub for England: Race and class in the time of the nation – Amit Singh, Sivamohan Valluvan, James Kneale
• “After Empire: Melancholia or Convivial Culture?” – Paul Gilroy
• “Stories from a migrant city” – Ben Rogaly
• “Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection” – Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing
• “The Invention of Tradition” – eds. Eric Hobsbawm, Terence Ranger
• “Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight” – Clifford Geertz

Read more about the work of Mary Louise Pratt.

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