Racial Masquerade Italian Style? Whiteface and Blackface in Zeudi Araya’s 1970s Comedies

Abstract

This article analyzes the performances of Eritrean actress Zeudi Araya in her middlebrow comedies from the late 1970s. I interpret her popularity in parallel with the incipient and coterminous immigration of women to Italy, from the former colonies of the Horn of Africa as well as from other developing countries, who provided informal welfare for the modernizing Italian family and partially substituted for Italian women’s double presence inside and outside the home. Il signor Robinson (Corbucci 1976) and Tesoromio (Paradisi 1979), in which Araya plays a domestic worker, include performances of whiteface, blackface, and mistaken identities between Italian and foreign characters. This racial masquerade inscribes the black immigrant woman within adulterous romances in which Araya’s exotic and submissive characters substitute for the emancipated white woman in the Italian family.The substitution simultaneously works to recall the colonial figure of the docile Black Venus while also restoring the sexual potency of the male inetto, a stock character from the Italian comic tradition. Further, these romances are framed within a geographical dichotomy of inclusion in private spaces and exclusion from public spaces. Araya’s characters either are entrapped within the intimate space of the Italian home or, when they appear in public, are located outside Italian national borders, in an escapist elsewhere such as the Caribbean or the imaginary island of Balicù. As this elsewhere is detached from any immediate references to the history of Italian colonialism, Araya’s comedies can draw from the colonial repertoire of images and visual tropes while disavowing any ideological engagement with that legacy.