Abstract
Italo Calvino is acknowledged as an important voice in post-war Italian literature. Together with other important Einaudi intellectuals, such as Elio Vittorini and Cesare Pavese, Calvino helped shape the narratives around, and the legacy of, the Italian resistance and anti-fascism. Through his work as an editor at Einaudi and his membership of the Communist Party, Calvino was strongly involved in post-war debates on inequality and societal change. This article investigates the connections between these interests of Calvino and important Einaudi intellectuals with reflections on Italy’s colonial past and the struggle for civil rights and racial equality (especially in the United States). The Marxist framework through which Calvino approached these matters made him somewhat colour blind, causing him to erase differences and disregard possible connections between colonial and post-colonial struggles for civil rights.
Highlights
Italo Calvino’s colour blindness and the question of race among Einaudi intellectuals ‘A scrivere sono io, certo, ma in questo io bisogna riconoscere la parte che ha il fatto che sono un bianco eurocentrico consumista petrolifago e alfabetifero’ (Calvino, Saggi 2825)
For Charles Leavitt, ‘impegno nero’ indicates the way in which important Italian intellectuals in post-Second World War Italy adopted a ‘self-reflective hermeneutics’ towards the American situation, demonstrating ‘their desire to uncover the Italian connotations of the American situation’ (Leavitt 2)
Taking Calvino as the pivotal example, I explore how the African American struggle and the Italian colonial legacy are present(ed) in Calvino’s reflections, in order to establish how ‘self-reflective’ Calvino proved to be in this particular respect
Summary
Italo Calvino’s colour blindness and the question of race among Einaudi intellectuals ‘A scrivere sono io, certo, ma in questo io bisogna riconoscere la parte che ha il fatto che sono un bianco eurocentrico consumista petrolifago e alfabetifero’ (Calvino, Saggi 2825).
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