Transgenerational shame in postcolonial Italy: Igiaba Scego’s Adua

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis article reads Igiaba Scego’s 2015 novel Adua as an expression of shame within the parameters of transgenerational emotion. The passage of shame is traced from a Somali subject of 1930s Italian colonialism to his daughter, Adua, in 1970s postcolonial Somalia, who later suffers the reverberations of the affective charge of shame in modern-day Italy. Grounded in psychoanalytical theories of individual and transgenerational shame, the article argues that Scego uses the repetition of linguistic patterns to elucidate how shame is passed down and experienced across two bodies, coming to the fore in a Rome characterized by postcolonial attitudes and the “European migrant crisis”. This article proposes that shame is a significant feature of Italian postcolonial writing, and enunciates a theory of transgenerational shame as a key aspect of the postcolonial aesthetic.