Paradigms of Postcoloniality in Contemporary Italy

Abstract

In a seminal essay that emphasizes the “dubious spatiality” and “problematic temporality” of the term “postcolonial,” Ella Shohat asks, “When exactly, then, does the ‘post-colonial’ begin?” (103). This question is particularly relevant for Italy, as the beginning of the decolonization process did not coincide with the beginning of the postcolonial era. In the period between 1890 and 1943, Italy claimed colonial rights over Eritrea, Somalia, parts of Libya, Ethiopia, the Dodecanese Islands, and Albania, but the postindependence period did not begin simultaneously for these territories. Italy officially renounced its colonial empire with the Paris Peace Treaty in 1947, but the colonies had already been lost following its defeat by the British Army in East Africa in 1941 and in Libya in 1943 and the take-over of the Italian colonies in Albania and the Dodecanese Islands by the German Army in 1943. Italy, however, sustained new kinds of colonial relations even after the loss of the colonies, both at a political level, as in the case of the Italian Trusteeship Administration in Somalia (Amministrazione Fiduciaria Italiana della Somalia, AFIS) from 1949 to 1960, and at an economic level, as occurred in Libya up until the mass exodus in 1970. Finally, the process of decolonization was not the outcome of colonial wars of independence, in which the periphery rebelled against the metropole; rather, it was the result of the weakening, and later the defeat, of Fascism. For all these reasons, the case of Italy—as a national paradigm rarely understood within a postcolonial framework—compels us to evaluate postcolonialism under a new light.