Borders of the Nation, Borders of Citizenship: Italian Repatriation and the Redefinition of National Identity after World War II

Abstract

Although Italian colonialism began to claim scholars' attention in a systematic way from the 1970s on, colonialism's epilogue—decolonization—remains largely ignored for the Italian case. What scholarship has been produced on the decolonization process after fascism's defeat tends either to focus on the details of the international treaty debates by which Italy's former possessions received independence or became trusteeships (the domain of diplomatic history), or to consider whether Italy constitutes a “postcolonial” space (the realm of cultural studies). Analyses of the latter variety note the general lack of public consciousness about Italy's colonial past or postcolonial present. Pinkus, for example, describes the cultural consequences of decolonization in terms of a nonevent: “The term nonevent suggests, indeed, that the lack of any traumatic severing of Italy's colonial appendages has contributed to the lack of a full-scale national reevaluation of the country's colonial past.” In an evocative analysis, Pinkus interprets Antonioni's 1962 film L'eclisse (The eclipse) as symptomatic of the eclipsing of the memories of colonialism's end. In the postwar period, she claims, such memories became displaced onto Italy's “conquest” of its urban peripheries (Italy's “deserts”) and their transformation into large-scale residential neighborhoods. Yet Pinkus conflates the recent silence about decolonization with silence about decolonization at the time of events, assuming the “lack of any traumatic severing of Italy's colonial appendages.” One visible (at least at the time, if not subsequently) and little explored aspect of the “trauma” of decolonization was the repatriation of Italian nationals from the ex possedimenti, or former possessions.