Made in Translation: A Collaborative Ethnography of Italian-Chinese Global Fashion

This talk is from the first part of our forthcoming book, Made in Translation: A Collaborative Ethnography of Italian-Chinese Global Fashion.  In this first part, we analyze the negotiations among Italian managers and Chinese entrepreneurs over the value of their contributions to the Chinese production of Italian fashion and the changing asymmetries in their relationships that shape these negotiations.  Critical to the outcome of these dynamic entanglements of transnational capitalism are the cultural processes through which Italians and Chinese actively construct their actions, dispositions, identities and labor power.  We show how labor power and value are forged through the encounter between Chinese and Italians rather than brought to it already formed.

Professor Lisa Rofel has been publishing books and articles on China for the last 30 years. Her most recent publication is the forthcoming collaboration with Sylvia Yanagisako entitled Made in Translation: A Collaborative Ethnography of Italian-Chinese Global Fashion 

Sylvia Yanagisako’s research and publications have focused on kinship, gender and capitalism.  Her book, Producing Culture and Capital: Family Firms in Italy (2002), traced the cultural and social processes through which family sentiments shaped the silk industry and the industrial district of Como, Italy.  Her earlier books include Transforming the Past: Tradition and Kinship among Japanese Americans (1985), Gender and Kinship:  Essays Toward a Unified Analysis (1987), and Unwrapping the Sacred Bundle:  the Disciplining of Anthropology (2005).  Her latest book, co-authored with Lisa Rofel, Made in Translation: A Collaborative Ethnography of Italian-Chinese Global Fashion is being published by Duke University Press.