"Il monocolore non esiste": Postcolonial ekphrasis in Igiaba Scego's novel La linea del colore. Il grand tour di Lafanu Brown

Abstract

Igiaba Scego’s novel La linea del colore. Il grand tour di Lafanu Brown (2020) is a historical novel, a feminist Bildungsroman, a contemporary migration novel and a global, political novel. It is also a novel of colours and images. The aim of this analysis is to investigate the function of ekphrasis – defined as verbal descriptions of visual representations – in La linea del colore. The question is how this literary device contributes to Scego’s pedagogical and political project of rewriting national history from the point of view of the subaltern, black Italians. Like in her other novels, Scego uses the past to illuminate the present. She relocates colonial memory at the centre of cultural debates in today’s Italy, deconstructing official colonial history. By analysing a small sample of ekphrases, regarding both real and imaginary statues and paintings in the novel, I would like to demonstrate that Scego adds new postcolonial interpretations to the described images. By doing so, she expresses ethical, ideological and poetological contents, aiming to convince her readers that the colour line between black and white people has to be overcome. Scego uses a classical literary device, the ekphrasis, to demonstrate that the line of colour is not only present today but also in Italian Renaissance and Baroque culture.