Abstract
This book skilfully explains the dynamic nature of global capitalism and illustrates how the Chinese-Italian transnational market and resource exchanges have expanded industrial capacity. The book also reveals the close relationship between capital practices and issues such as nationalism, gender, kinship, politics, the state, and social inequality. It provides an in-depth examination of the cruciality of historical legacies; the interaction of modern transnational capital practices; the escalation of conflicts; and the historical significance of these interactions.
The book applies a rather innovative research methodology in that multi-lingual anthropologists specializing in regional studies engage in collaborative ethnography. This innovative methodology has yielded analytical insights, for instance, the reconceptualization of transnational capitalism, including the study of cultural production which takes into account the variety of actors involved in transnational capital practices.
The book examines the industrial development that Italy has undergone since the Second World War and argues that mixed state–private enterprises existed long before neoliberalism. Through their research, the authors also find that hybrid entities of public–private arrangements in contemporary China are not purely hybrid in nature; in fact, it is difficult to differentiate between public and private corporations and the boundary between public and private is deliberately blurred. Lisa Rofel and Sylvia Yanagisako argue that it is important to pay attention to managerial labour in the study of the value and subjectivities of managers and labourers. Furthermore, most research on capitalism has tended to focus on the accumulation of property and capital, the restructuring of social life, and rising social inequality. Rofel and Yanagisako show that kinship, gender, values, nationalism, and identity are the driving forces behind capitalism in contemporary China. They argue that powerful cultural sentiments and commitments mediate the dynamic processes of capital accumulation.
As a collaborative ethnography of Sino-Italian ventures in the fashion industry, this book makes a contribution to fashion studies, and it depicts the struggles and conflicts of the industry. The book is divided into three parts, namely ‘The negotiation of value’; ‘Historical legacies and revisionist histories’; and ‘Kinship and transnational capitalism’. In Part 2, fashion studies scholar Simona Segre Reinach contributes a chapter titled ‘One fashion, two nations’. Segre Reinach situates transnational Chinese-Italian collaborations in the history of fashion production and discusses the problems related to such collaboration and the significant contribution of the fashion industry’s structure and history. At the micro level, there is competition among fashion designers, entrepreneurs, managers, and workers, while the macro perspective reveals the competition for power and rivalries between Western monopolies and newly developing nations. However, power relations in Chinese-Italian collaboration are constantly changing. While Italy has been more successful in the global fashion industry and the relationship between the two countries is asymmetrical, this relationship is being negotiated through increasing domestic consumption by a growing Chinese middle class and by the Chinese government’s stimulation of the knowledge economy and culture industries. Segre Reinach shows how these collaborations and negotiations have resituated Italian fashion in China’s global fashion landscape and that the cultural construction of ‘Made in Italy’ is complex, continually evolving, and reconfiguring the dynamics of fashion production, distribution, and consumption.
The various aspects discussed in this book are proof that fashion constitutes a rich and diverse research field for transnational, transcultural, and transdisciplinary investigation and observation. The authors carefully analyse the exchanges and conflicts between material culture and non-material culture, as well as the contest between economic capital and cultural capital in the field of fashion. Fashion has become a serious academic discipline in the study of contemporary industries, political economy, and transnational capitalism. I would recommend this book to a broad readership interested in these topics as well as in Chinese studies, area studies, and kinship.