Digestible otherness: Chinese New Year representations in late nineteenth-century Italian press

This study examines how the Italian popular press transformed representations of the Chinese New Year between 1882 and 1916, arguing this period marked a decisive shift in Western European perceptions of Chinese culture. Moving beyond Orientalism as imperial domination, this article proposes ‘journalistic Orientalism’ – a distinct form of cultural representation driven by the commercial and narrative logics of the mass media market. Through analysis of five articles published in Italian magazines, the study shows how the press systematically extracted, simplified, and commodified the Chinese New Year into ‘cultural snippets’ – fireworks, lanterns, and exotic foods – designed for rapid consumption. The Italian case proves particularly revealing because Italy’s limited colonial ambitions in East Asia isolates commercial from political mechanisms of Orientalist representation. By tracing the festival’s migration from elite missionary accounts into mass-circulation periodicals, this article illuminates the origins of a modern perceptual habit: encountering profound cultural difference through decontextualized snippets that reveal more about Western desires than about the cultures they describe.