Alberto Moravia’s Orientalist Gazes at China Through an American Prism

China played a significant role in broadening the cultural horizons and the scope of professional activities of journalist and writer Alberto Moravia (1907–90). He experienced twentieth-century China on three trips in three pivotal decades for the Chinese: 1937, 1967, and 1986. His published travel writings on China are numerically superior to those on any other country. Previous scholarship emphasizes a contextual reading of Moravia’s China-related outputs which attend to both Italian and Chinese politics and histories. In the present study, I propose that we should pay equal attention to cultural mobilities—intended first and foremost here as the rhetorical deployment of cross-cultural comparisons to make sense of in-person mobility experiences—by highlighting his mobilization of an Orientalist framework in tandem with an American prism. I show how Orientalism fundamentally informed Moravia’s work in the three decades as a technology of cultural mobilities and how it was rhetorically executed with American capitalism as a foil. In doing so, the essay underscores the methodological necessity to study China–Italy cultural dynamics by not only focusing on the two countries but also including analytical consideration of multiple international mobilities which impact China–Italy relations.