NOMOS, IDENTITY AND OTHERNESS: CIRO POGGIALI'S DIARIO AOI 1936–1937 AND THE REPRESENTATION OF THE ITALIAN COLONIAL WORLD

Abstract

The article begins by looking at the body of written and visual material that was produced on the colonial world in the interwar years. It considers various reading strategies that can be applied to this body of work and how it can be addressed through post-colonial criticism. The article argues that the work of the sociologist Peter Berger offers a series of insights into the way in which this material represents the social world, and the notions of collective identity and alterity that are central to that world. In the light of Berger's thinking on the socially constructed nomos, the essay examines some of the definitions of the relation between metropolitan and subject communities that recur in writings on the reality of colonialism. The essay explores the relationship of an individual author to the nomos of his or her time by looking in detail at one text: the journalist Ciro Poggiali's diary of the time he spent in Ethiopia in the immediate aftermath of the Italian conquest of the country. It examines how Poggiali's diary can be interpreted as a complex account of how the coerciveness of the social world is experienced by individual consciousness and how its definitions of racial and cultural belonging can be appropriated or challenged. The essay concludes by arguing that the analysis of strategies for defining identity and otherness within the Italian colonial context can be taken further by working within a comparative framework.