L'Italiano Negro

Abstract

I discuss the complicated process of the early twentieth-century construction of the multifaceted, certainly controversial and mostly unspoken, Italian idea of whiteness. In order to capture the wide range of representations and self-representations that converged in unified Italy's racialized identity politics, I analyse the intertwined and continuous rearticulation of the processes of altero- and auto-referential racialization (as articulated by Colette Guillaumin in 1972), that occurred in a span of time that covers Liberal Italy and early Fascism (1870s–1936). In particular, I pay attention to continuities and discontinuities between the two historical phases in order to grasp the very peculiarities of a long-term construction of Italianness in terms of ‘unspoken whiteness’. The ‘unspoken’ character of this major version of ‘Italianità’ derives from the altero-referential nature of both Liberal and Fascist Italy's racialization. With altero-referential racism I refer to a system of racialization that is centred on the Other. In both Liberal Italy and Fascism, the assignment of a precise colour (from a darker nuance than white, to black) to the internal/colonial Other implicitly produces the racial identity of the Self. This ‘continuity’ between Liberal and Fascist racializations highlights the existing discontinuity between that period and late Fascism (1936–45). In line with scholars like Barbara Sòrgoni, Giulia Barrera, Roberto Maiocchi, Aaron Gillette and Olindo de Napoli, I consider the first period as sharply distinguished from the one following, which was characterized by that claim of Aryanness (1936–45) that would be at the core of Fascist discourse on race from 1936 to 1937. This second phase would be characterized by a decidedly auto-referential racialization that claimed racial purity and self-consistency as the mark of the incommensurability between Italian racial identity and inferior racialized groups.