Creator’s statement

“The Orient was linked thus to elements in Western society (delinquents, the insane, women, the poor) having in common an identity that best described as lamentably alien.” Edward Said, Orientalism (207)

“Europe, in the context described by Said, could fathom its identity not only by opposing itself to the Orient but by matching itself against those internal elements of Western society.” Roberto Dainotto, Europe (in Theory) (54)

Sciangai and Corea are two of Italy’s most peculiar toponyms, deriving from the Chinese city of Shanghai and the country of Korea, respectively. While these names suggest a direct link to Chinese and Korean migrants, they do not denote Chinatowns or Koreatowns. Rather, they function as derogatory designations for marginalized urban spaces across Italy—zones that failed to align with the dominant narrative of national progress and modernization. Sciangai (also spelled Shangai in various Italian transliterations) emerged in the 1930s as a term for overcrowded, unsanitary, and impoverished districts on the periphery of Italian cities, like Bolzano, Crotone, and Rome. Corea came into use during the postwar years, particularly around the 1950s economic boom, as Italy transitioned from a largely agrarian society to an industrialized nation (Ginsborg 210). These Corea neighborhoods were marked by crumbling housing built by internal migrants and inadequate infrastructure, undermining the image of a newly prosperous, modern Italy. While Sciangai challenged Fascist ideals of national strength, Corea subverted the postwar narrative of economic recovery and modernization.

But how and why did these areas come to be called Sciangai and Corea? What did Italians actually know about Shanghai and Korea? With the expansion of mass media between the 1930s and the 1950s, Italians became increasingly aware of international conflicts (Forgacs & Gundle 17), including the Battle of Shanghai (1937) and the Korean War (1950–1953). It was precisely this period that the archival footages used in my video essay was produced. Archival research suggests that these conflicts—and the visual imagery associated with them—shaped Italian perceptions of Shanghai and Korea as war-torn, chaotic, and degraded spaces. As the historian John Foot puts it, “[z]ones characterized by this immigrant self-construction of dwellings became known as ‘coree’ because of their similarity to images appearing at the time from the Korean War” (46). A resident of Milan’s Corea echoes this comparison, stating, “viviamo come coreani” (“we live like Koreans”; quoted in Franco & Montaldi, 197). Although scholars have noted the similarity and simultaneity between the Italian Corea and Korea (Ginsborg 225, Forgacs 32), I have found no study explicitly dedicated to demonstrating the visual resemblance. This gap led me to ask: What happens if we literally juxtapose images of the Italian Sciangai and Corea with those of Shanghai and Korea that Italians might have encountered? This visual “similarity” became the initial impetus for my research.

The videographic form of my research was begun at the 2025 “Reframing the Argument” video essay workshop at the University of Notre Dame, organized by Ariel Avissar, Colleen Laird, Matthew Payne, and Barbara Zecchi, in response to prompts developed by Avissar and Laird. In the early stages of my final project, I aimed to visually demonstrate the supposed resemblances between the Italian Sciangai and Corea neighborhoods and their East Asian namesakes. I sought to construct a visual archive, juxtaposing shots of Italian slums with archival footage of Shanghai and Korea in ruins. However, I quickly encountered a significant challenge: the visual similarities were scarce and fleeting. Drawing on a range of historical materials—including Italian newsreels on Rome’s Sciangai, the Chinese city of Shanghai, and Korea; photographs of Crotone’s Sciangai; documentary films set in Bolzano’s Sciangai and Milan’s Corea; footage from wartime and postwar Korea, and a feature film shot during the Korean War—I found only a handful of extremely brief shots (typically two to four seconds long) that could support my videographic argument. To address this, I developed a strategy of rapid juxtaposition, placing paired images side-by-side with an equals sign (=) between them. On the left: a shot of an Italian Sciangai or Corea; on the right: a corresponding image from wartime Shanghai or Korea. This technique created an extremely fast-paced sequence of visual pairings that conveyed an impression of similarity, even where it was minimal or contrived.

An epiphany occurred during a group feedback session at the workshop, when I presented an early version of this work and received comments from Ariel Avissar, who led the discussion, as well as from fellow participants Rotem Sudman and Yaron Baruch. Avissar’s question about the intentionality behind the fast-paced editing prompted me to reflect more critically on my own choices. While my intent was to highlight visual parallels, viewers struggled to process the imagery due to the rapid editing pace. The human mind requires time to absorb visual information and to follow interpretive cues—through accompanying text, voice-over, or a slower rhythm. Yet to achieve my goal of demonstrating the visual similarities, I needed to harness the velocity of juxtaposition to generate a deceptive sense of similarity. I was, in effect, producing an optical illusion.

Rather than pivoting toward a more explanatory or didactic mode, I chose to embrace the editing logic of the early draft while drawing attention to the illusion it constructs. To underscore the constructedness of the visual parallels, I introduced additional symbolic elements—alongside the equals sign used to suggest sameness—such as the not-equals sign (an idea suggested by Matthew Payne) and the letter “F” to signify “fiction.” The final version remains visually fast-paced, but it also calls attention to the disparities between the images, inviting viewers to question the illusion. Because I rely on a limited number of archival footages, brief shots are recycled and transformed into segments that respond to the rhythmic tempo of the sound, emphasizing not only similarities but also differences.

My realization that the names Sciangai and Corea did not originate from obvious visual similarities, but rather from historical constructions, marked a turning point in my research. I came to understand that the equivalence implied in Sciangai = Shanghai and Corea = Korea was itself a fiction (as the letter “F” signifies). These perceived similarities were less a product of visual resemblance and more attributable to preexisting (and non-visual) ideological frameworks. This realization prompted a return to archival and oral sources with renewed critical attention. For instance, the phrase of the inhabitant in Milan’s Corea, “we live like Koreans,” should not be read merely as a visual analogy. Its full context reveals more:

“Siamo a otto chilometri da Milano e ci manca tutto laggiù. Lì non c’è una strada, non c’è luce che per mettere tre o quattro metri di filo ci vogliono un sacco di soldi, e viviamo come coreani.”

“We are eight kilometers from Milan, and we have nothing here that we had there. There are no streets, no lights, to put up just a few meters of wire costs a fortune, and we live like Koreans.” (Quoted in Montaldi & Alasia 197)

The quotation reveals the divide between center and periphery, highlighting the inadequate infrastructure in the periphery, which ultimately leads the speaker to draw an analogy between the inhabitants of Milan’s Corea neighborhood (“We”) and Koreans in East Asia (“Koreans”). A journalist (probably) reporting on one of Milan’s Corea neighborhoods recalled Sciangai in Rome and captioned an image of the (possible) “coreani” (Koreans) with the remark: “qua si fa veramente una vita da cani” (“here people live a dog’s life”; Toti 6). What ideological mechanisms transformed the lived experiences of impoverished Italians into Koreans before turning them into dogs?

Thanks to the videographic process, my research now situates these naming practices within a broader historical framework, particularly in the context of Italian orientalism since unification. Around the delayed unification in 1861, Southern Italy was often portrayed as barbaric and uncivilized, as reflected in expressions like “This is Africa” (Moe 164). When cities began to expand in the 1930s and 1950s, Italy required new terms to label emerging urban slums. The names Sciangai and Corea were coined during these decades, respectively. It is no coincidence that both China and Korea were targets of denigration and racialized condemnation by Fascist travel writers when parts of China and Korea were under Japanese rule (Basilone 461). When images of Korean ruins and shantytowns began to appear in Italian mass media in the early 1950s, the legacy of Sciangai—a naming practice that used East Asian racial Others to label Italian slums—resurfaced and paved the way for the emergence of a “Korea without Koreans” (Parati 95). My video essay sought to show how Italy othered its own marginalized populations, those living in urban slums, by borrowing the names of external Others, thereby creating an equivalence without equality (Sciangai =, ≠ Shanghai and Corea =, ≠ Korea).

Final notes: The title of the video essay was suggested by Matthew Payne. I thank him for offering one that features both the equals and not-equals signs. The idea that Corea and Sciangai could be more than mere placenames was also inspired by Barbara Zecchi’s insightful question—raised during one of the feedback sessions—about whether they might also be understood as concepts.

Works Cited

Alasia, Franco & Danilo Montaldi. Milano, Corea. Inchiesta sugli immigrati negli anni del miracolo, Donzelli Editore, 2010 [1960].

Basilone, Linetto. “Through East Asia to the Sound of ‘Giovinezza’: Italian Travel Literature on China, Korea and Japan during the Fascist ventennio,” Modern Italy, 2019, 24.4, 2019: 457–468.

Dainotto, Roberto. Europe (in Theory), Duke UP, 2007.

Foot, John. “Revisiting the Coree: Self-construction, Memory and Immigration on the Milanese Periphery, 1950–2000, Italian Cityscapes: Culture and Urban Change in Contemporary Italy, edited by Robert Lumley and John Foot, U of Exeter P, 2004.

Forgacs, David. Italy’s Margins: Social Exclusion and Nation Formation since 1861, Cambridge UP, 2014.

Forgacs, David & Stephen Gundle. Mass Culture and Italian Society from Fascism to the Cold War, Indiana UP, 2008.

Ginsborg, Paul. A History of Contemporary Italy: Society and Politics, 1943–1988, St. Martin’s Griffin, 2003.

Moe, Nelson. The View from Vesuvius: Italian Culture and the Southern Question, U of California P, 2006.

Parati, Graziella. Migrant Writers and Urban Space in Italy: Proximities and Affect in Literature and Film, Palgrave Macmillan, 2017.

Said, Edward. Orientalism, Vintage Books, 1978.

Toti, Gianni. “La nuova Milano è la vecchia Sciangai,” Vie nuove, 26 November 1950, p. 6.

Biography

Inha Park is a fourth-year Ph.D. student in Italian Studies at the University of Notre Dame, where she is a Presidential Fellow in the Humanities. She earned her bachelor’s degree in Italian from Busan University of Foreign Studies and her master’s degree in Comparative Literature from Seoul National University in South Korea. Her research interests include global neorealism, decolonization, Italy and the Cold War, and the Italian concept of the “world.” Her dissertation explores the cultural exchanges and mutual influences between Italy and South Korea during the Cold War, highlighting how these intersections prompt a rethinking of postcolonial world-making and globalization.

Review by Mario Coglitore, Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia

Inha Park’s videographic work is a true moving archive, a reflection on the “other than us” charged with hopes and doubts, raising questions that are not easy to answer. Technically excellent, this video essay deserves our full attention for what it conveys in three and a half minutes of sharp conceptual density and equally rare breadth of vision.

The documentary lexicon, skillfully composed by pairing images with words and symbols, allows us to “read” the reality of abandonment, exclusion, and marginality simply by looking. By letting flickers of visual testimonies from the distant past appear in our eyes—surprised spectators as the rapid flow of information reaches our brains, becoming interpretation and then awareness—the act of watching is punctuated by an invasive, syncopated soundtrack that allows no pause: a reinterpretation of a musical piece, which in its original version, reworked by the author, carries an intimate and evocative title, “habitual places,” or even better, “frequented zone,” the places we often inhabit: “stomping grounds,” precisely.

Yet the streets, houses, and people that populate the desolate and compact filmic fragments, with their peripheral materiality mostly made of dust and mud, among foul-smelling puddles and dilapidated buildings, are the black-and-white landscapes along which the lives of the “Others” unfold. Maps of exclusion and forced removal, of ruthless imposition of life regimes that require no walls to decree an immutable state of otherness. Edward Said was right when he wrote in Culture and Imperialism: “Just as none of us is outside or beyond geography, none of us is completely free from the struggle over geography” (7). The struggle over geography that has characterized the West’s perceptual mode since at least the nineteenth century, when it elaborated the essence of its particular Orient—reducing it to a simulacrum of immobility and lack of development, indolence and apathy—forcefully inserts the “Others” into the concentration-like spaces of subjugation, which become the physical perimeters of being “beyond” the borders of the “Us,” in an elsewhere that, though very near, can only be a variable geometry of subalternity.

Shanghai and Korea—places of the exotic and, in any case, the miserable, the unknowable, and what we prefer to believe we never see—become words turned into things in the sense of the inferior, more than ever concrete representations of a dark and above all alien measure of the world. Skillfully, Inha Park allows the ruthless concreteness of the “underworld” to burst into our imagination and follow the play of memory, becoming an order of symbolic language. We are predisposed to consider the “Other than us” not only as unknown but also as irreducibly different.

This is not exclusively about the “Others” who occupy distant geographies. The mental maps through which we navigate, step by step, strongly influence our internal cartography as well. We find “Shanghai” and “Corea” near our homes, in Rome, Milan, Crotone, Bolzano, in the Italy of fascist racism, which was eager to criminalize anything that did not seem to correspond to a salvific “Us,” and in the postwar period, seeking a modern and industrial destiny at any cost to oppose rural and suburban poverty. Ghostly “free zones,” detached from any reference to presumed or so-called civilization, where the “Others” spend days to forget, “living like dogs.”

Flashes of photographic frames, sometimes melting into filmic sequences, connect West and East, ideally linking the “Others” here to those over there, under the graphic sign of equality. But it is not so: equality is actually equivalence, a semantic structure that points to two diversities, both internal to their respective contexts, related and perhaps the result of an interpretive “fiction” that Park insists on claiming even as she enunciates its possibility.

To slip into the universe of the “Others” and become trapped there, however, requires little. Role reversal can still catch us by surprise, today, as the East emerges—perhaps already victorious—over a West torn apart by its own hubris.

References

Said, Edward, Culture and Imperialism, Vintage Books, 1994.

Review by Vicente Rodríguez Ortega, Universidad Carlos III Madrid

This is a striking and incisive piece that uses visual experimentation as its central method and praxis. By working with very limited archival material, it turns scarcity into a recourse, showing how even the shortest fragments can reveal the ways Italy has imagined and constructed its own internal “Others.”

What stands out most is how the rapid editing and side-by-side images make the viewer feel the instability of the comparisons being drawn. The video seems to show that the similarities between Sciangai/Shanghai or Corea/Korea are real; instead, it shows how easily such resemblances can be fabricated, and how those fabrications have shaped the Italian social imaginary for decades.

By embracing the tension between resemblance and fiction, this audiovisual work makes visible the ideological framework behind these processes of naming. It reveals how Italy, during periods of urban growth and ensuing social anxieties, mobilized distant Eastern imaginaries to label and contain its own marginalized spaces.

The result is both thoughtful and unsettling—a piece that not only investigates a historical process but also makes us reflect on what it means to look, compare, and taxonomize.

Licensing

CC by 4.0

Competing Interests

The author has no competing interests to declare.