Debunking anti-Chinese stereotypes in Italy: intersectional perspectives and intermedial aesthetics in Sergio Basso’s Giallo a Milano (2009)1

Abstract

ABSTRACT In this essay I analyse Sergio Basso’s documentary Giallo a Milano (Made in Chinatown, 2009), which took part in a wide-ranging media debate following the April 2007 protest of the Chinese community in Via Paolo Sarpi in Milan. In particular, my focus is on the various intermedial strategies employed within it, which, on the one hand, offer an extremely multifaceted and aesthetically sophisticated counter-narrative of its subject and, on the other, allow to debunk many of the stereotypes circulating about the Chinese in dominant mass media and popular discourse, powerfully bringing to light a series of portraits of migrant and post-migrant subjectivities in contemporary Italy, in which the complex intertwining of their identities of ethnicity and race, gender, social class and sexual orientation are constructed and performed on the cinema screen.