Black women at war: The Shadow King (2019), Cronache dalla polvere (2019), and intersectional violence in contemporary Italy

Abstract

ABSTRACT Through a comparative analysis of Maaza Mengiste’s award-winning The Shadow King (2019) and Zoya Barontini’s collective mosaic novel Cronache dalla polvere (Chronicles from the dust) (2019), this article traces the roots of contemporary Italy’s intersectional violence back to the country’s colonial history. While the Ethiopian American Mengiste redresses the masculine language of war by dramatizing the historical experience of Ethiopian female partisans, the Italian authors of Cronache dalla polvere deliberately assign to Ethiopian female characters the task of recording, remembering, and retelling the atrocities committed by the Italian fascists against the local population. Drawing on interdisciplinary explorations of the intersections among race, gender, and class in contemporary Italy by Heather Merrill and Gaia Giuliani, and in Italian postcolonial literature by Caterina Romeo, it seeks to demonstrate how the two novels attempt to reorient the Italian literary archive in ways that illuminate the colonial matrix of the country’s persistent culture of intersectional violence.