‘White queens’ and ‘Nubian fiends’: Early Italian American fiction and the problem of colonialism

Abstract

AbstractThis article analyses the transatlantic influence of colonialist discourse regarding Italian colonial wars in East Africa, by focusing on literary texts. In the emerging Italian American literature, two works by key authors reflected on the impact of colonialist propaganda in the Italian America. Emanuel Carnevali’s ‘Tale One’ (1919) centers on his aunt’s experience in Eritrea around the time of the battle of Adwa (1896). The analysis of these two texts, which rewrote and challenged the central elements of nationalist propaganda, offers a unique chance to understand the complex relationship between nationalist discourse and diasporic communities, in a textual form—migrant literature—that by definition re-uses and combines elements from different cultural spaces to make sense of the experience of displacement.