Italian Colonialism Research Articles

Colonial Subjects and Others: Racism and Inequality during Italian Rule in the Horn of Africa

Abstract In the history of the Horn of Africa, Italian colonial rule came as a new chapter of a long history of foreigner rulers, conflicts, and translocal exchanges. Yet, Italian colonialism left long-lasting traces in the memory of the inhabitants of Eritrea, Somalia, and Ethiopia. The present contribution deals with citizenship policy in the territories of the Horn of Africa during Italian rule (1880s– 1940s). It centers on the racialized and instrumentalized form of citizenship, i.e., colonial subjecthood (sudditanza coloniale), created by the Kingdom of Italy to keep local colonial inhabitants outside of the metropolitan legal sphere. The basis for this differentiating policy was the Eurocentric assumption of a racial and cultural superiority of the colonizers vis-à-vis the colonized. Yet, ethnic, religious, and socioeconomic differences kept existing in colonial society. The article examines the different meanings and contents colonial subjecthood assumed throughout the years of Italian rule and the reasons of those changes. Furthermore, it looks at how diverse members of local society faced the citizenship policy of the Italian colonizer and how they, if possible, tried to negotiate their legal condition on the spot.

Between Legacy and Agency: Italo-Eritreans Raised in Orphanages and Their Access to Italian Citizenship

Abstract In Eritrea, Italian colonialism introduced and regulated the opportunity for mixed-race individuals with Italian ancestry to obtain Italian citizenship. This opportunity was modified over time depending on changes in Italian and Eritrean citizenship laws. Moreover, laws and socialization shaped Italo-Eritreans as a minority and a “different” group that reproduced itself even after colonialism. Over time, the number of Italo-Eritreans varied as did their sense of belonging to a real or imagined community. The case of mixed-race children abandoned during Italian colonialism provides an insight into the importance of social institutions in building legal and social identities through socialization. Using an interdisciplinary, qualitative-quantitative approach, I focus on the convergence between the processes of inclusion within legal (citizenship) and social (identity) categories, as well as on the agency of Italo-Eritreans raised in orphanages in transforming a stigma into a resource to gain the Italian citizenship.

QUANDO FINÌ IL COLONIALISMO ITALIANO? TRE DECOLONIZZAZIONI A CONFRONTO

The end of Italian colonialism cannot simply be limited to Italy’s military defeat during the Second World War and the consequent loss of colonial possessions. In actuality, the Republic of Italy clamored for the restitution of the former colonies until the rejection of the Bevin-Sforza Compromise at the U.N. General Assembly in 1949. It is therefore justifiable to point out the reality of an Italian colonialism during the Republican era, with its specific characteristics, which was the premise of the decolonization processes for Libya, Eritrea and Somalia. This note takes into consideration the specificity of these three paths of decolonization with reference to the Italian transition from a renewed colonial policy to a real postcolonial one.

Italy in East Asia: Colonial Ambitions, Power Politics and Failures

The demographic-migration issue was to become a key alibi in Rome’s effort to take colonies, in which Italians were promised cultivable land, opportunities, social stature and advancement. The channeling of the surplus population in other areas constituted one of the pillars of Italian colonial policy and, by extension, reinforced the rhetoric linking the demographic issue with the quest for colonies. This justification of Italian colonialism as an alternative solution to the population problem had a more logical basis compared to the potential economic and raw material benefits of Africa or Asia.

Activist by Default

This interview with Igiaba Scego, renowned Italian author and journalist of Somali descent, explores the relationship between letteratura della migrazione, the italophone migrant literary movement of the 1990s and early 2000s, and migritude, a burgeoning global literary genre and field of scholarship that addresses contemporary discourses of migration and their colonial histories. Scego discusses her resistance to the category of “migrant writer” and the challenge of retelling stories of postcolonial African diaspora to Italy in the context of Italian colonialism in the Horn of Africa. She discusses what it means to claim the city of Rome as one’s own as a black Italian, and places stories of flight and belonging in a global and historical context. This interview was conducted over WhatsApp, transcribed, and translated into English in February 2019.

The Barren Mediterranean: Rural Imaginary in Italian Colonial Libya

Author(s): Monserrati, Michele | Abstract: The article considers the development of Italy’s Mediterranean identity from the country’s Unification to the Turco-Italian War (1911-1912). I show how Italy’s political ambition to restore Roman control over the Mediterranean Sea (Mare Nostrum) generated two alternative representations of the Roman myth: a sea-based and a land-based one. After the initial success of the maritime version of this myth, I argue that the years leading up to the war in Libya represented a shifting moment toward a reconsideration of the Romans’ agrarian legacy. Therefore, I maintain that an analysis of the Italian aesthetic of “Mediterraneism” should include representations of the natural environment. I show how Italians considered the idea of a uniform Mediterranean landscape as a natural historical landmark to testify the historical presence of the ancient Romans in North Africa and to legitimize the link between the Italian colonies and their supposedly glorious ancestors. Ultimately, by insisting on the botanical similarities between Italy and the North African shore, I demonstrate how the Libyan territory came to be represented as a landscape of the ‘self,’ while manifesting the presence of the Muslim’ other’ in the form of its most arid regions.

Colonial borders and hybrid identities: Lessons from the case of Eritrea

Abstract Colonialism left numerous borders in its wake that subsequently became contested. These colonial borders have often been discussed as artificial, dividing communities, people or ethnicities that otherwise would belong together. Such an interpretation of colonial borders, I argue in this article, overlooks another important aspect of colonial boundaries: their role in creating nations as ‘imagined communities’ who in making reference to such borders can lay claim to a distinct national identity. While such an identity can be exclusionary and trigger conflict, it can also have a much more positive and ultimately hybrid function. I use the case of Italian colonialism in the Horn of Africa to demonstrate these multiple roles colonial boundaries can occupy and focus specifically on the creation and contestations of the borders of Eritrea. I argue that the acceptance of borders as markers of identity can be a prerequisite for finding innovative ways to overcome exclusions in the everyday lives of borderland groups. Thus, the example of Eritrea could hold wider lessons for addressing postcolonial disputes about borders and boundaries, if institutional arrangements are put in place that allow fluidity in everyday encounters.

Transgenerational shame in postcolonial Italy: Igiaba Scego’s Adua

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.

Italian Colonialism and Resistances to Empire, 1930–1970

Italian Colonialism and Resistances to Empire, 1930–1970

Neelam Srivastava. Italian Colonialism and Resistances to Empire, 1930–1970.

Neelam Srivastava. Italian Colonialism and Resistances to Empire, 1930–1970.

Italian Colonialism in the Making of National Consciousness: Representations of African Natives

This paper proposes a critical investigation of the discursive constructions supporting the othering of the African native in both the liberal and Fascist phases of Italian colonialism. It focuses on the production of narratives describing African populations and investigates their participation in the crystallization of a self/other dichotomy, to frame the participation of colonialism in the development of the Italian national consciousness from the late 19th century onwards. The research addresses the experiences and comments of explorers, journalists, jurists and relevant personalities of the colonial administration to tackle what they thought of their African counterparts, and how they portrayed them to the Italian public. In particular, the paper recognizes the existence of a plurality of othering categories and stereotypes attributed to African populations and addresses their development and transformation alongside the socio-political transformation of Italian nationalism and Italian colonialism.

Religion as Resistance: Negotiating Authority in Italian Libya

Religion as Resistance: Negotiating Authority in Italian Libya

Italian Colonialism in Africa as a Connected System: Institutions, Men and Colonial Troops

ABSTRACTIn the last two decades studies on Italian colonialism have shown remarkable vitality and many positive results. But in spite of this undoubted progress there still remain some limitations of approach that prevent any real outstripping of the interpretive schemes hitherto used. The research being conducted largely follows the nation state paradigm: the Italian colonies are viewed and studied as essentially independent entities, devoid of relations with the surrounding territories and, above all, between each of these and the others.This article offers an interpretive scheme that stresses the intimate relationship among the Italian colonial possessions in Africa, their status as a system, by moving away from a representation that has always favoured a rigorously individualised treatment of Italy’s colonies. It emphasises three main levels of interconnection: administrative structures, officials and colonial troops. While the first two were also common to other colonial entities, the extreme recourse to the mobility of colonial troops was a distinctive feature of the Italian version and the main factor of interconnection among Italy’s territories.Our analysis also enables us to better understand the place violence held in Italian colonialism. Along with analyzing the deportations, massacres and use of gas, we must consider the uninterrupted cycle of campaigns that from 1911 to 1941 Italy inflicted on its colonies. For the most part, wars were delegated to colonial troops who for thirty years, moving from one colony to another, made war and violence a fundamental aspect of the Italian colonial experience.

Fascism, Violence, and Italian Colonialism

ABSTRACTThe foundations of Italy’s colonial empire in Africa were laid when Italy was an aspirational and well-meaning liberal nation. In the 1920s and 1930s, like its predecessor, Mussolini’s Fascist state also looked to Africa to expand. Focusing on the Italian reconquest of Libya in the late 1920s and early 1930s, as well as the brutal massacre of civilians that took place in Ethiopia in 1937, this article looks into the nature of Italian colonial violence and asks what difference Fascism made. Looking back at the Italian massacre of Libyans in Tripoli in 1911 as well, it argues that Fascism did not so much turn Italians into Mussolini’s ‘willing executioners’ – though they did indeed kill willingly in Africa – but rather that the regime succeeded in removing certain factors, such as free press and political plurality, which had been present in the liberal era and had acted to restrain the use of unlimited violence in the colonial setting.

Between Sovereignty and Race: The Bombardment of Hospitals in the Italo-Ethiopian War and the Colonial Imprint of International Law

Italy's war crimes during the 1935–1936 invasion of Ethiopia have been broadly documented by different historians of Italian colonialism. However, its systematic bombardment of medical facilities operated by different Red Cross Societies is much less known. Relying on archival materials, we show how the fascist regime presented these attacks as legitimate reprisal; it was, the Italians claimed, the Ethiopian forces who had violated international law, particularly the principle of distinction, when they used medical facilities to hide. Reconstructing the debates about the Red Cross medical units, we show how Ethiopia's sovereign status rendered international law applicable, since the war was carried out between two internationally recognized countries rather than between a sovereign state and its colonial subjects. Simultaneously however, Ethiopia's status as a sovereign state was extremely precarious. The African country was successfully framed by both Italy and the Red Cross as uncivilized through the creation of an artificial link between the ostensible inability to follow the principle of distinction (i.e. hiding behind medical units) and the population's race. The move from sovereignty to race is, we claim, illuminating because it reveals how the inclusion of Ethiopia into the family of nations not only did not undermine the colonial imprint of international law, but also helped cement it. It is therefore crucial to think about the process of colonial inclusion into the liberal order of humanity against the grain, and to reveal how integration through sovereignty can be transmogrified into racist exclusion.

The Phenomenology of Arnaldo Bertola: Legal Categories, Cognitive Interests, Religious Habits, and Their Interaction into the Life of an Italian Colonialist

Italian colonialism was brief, notably transient and disorganized, especially when compared to its European counterparts, but it was characterized by an amazing experimental inspiration from the legal field. Italian legal professionals working in the colonies were compelled to develop their own-often original and creative-legal approaches in managing the complex relationships between legal authorities and colonial subjectivities. This paper analyzes the extraordinary efforts of one such colonial jurist, Arnaldo Bertola. Bertola was a judge in Libya and Rhodes, a Professor of colonial law at the University of Turin 1930’s, and a legal expert in Mogadishu, Somalia, after the war. Bertola’s case is noteworthy because of his innovative thinking, his remarkable personality, his unusual cultural eclecticism, and his steady inner faith in the value of religious freedom. The essay explores his writings not only for his legal achievements, but also for his very human curiosities and uncertainties in confronting the stranger, the colonized, and the foreigner: in a word, the other.

From a Place in the Sun to the Heart of Darkness: Contemporary Crime Fiction and Italy’s Colonial Past

ABSTRACTFocussing on a group of recent novels set against the background of Italy’s colonies in East Africa during the Fascist period, this essay aims at investigating a fundamental tension within the tradition of Italian crime fiction, and, more specifically, of historical crime fiction. On the one hand, by shedding light into the darker and less explored corners of Italy’s past, the genre aims at serving as a sort of ‘new social novel’, to paraphrase the title of a 2004 book by Marco Sangiorgi and Luca Telò. On the other, the conventions and generic requirements of crime and detective fiction – in particular, its frequent recourse to stereotyped situations and characters – can hamper the reconstruction of complex experiences such as that of Italian colonialism. A detailed discussion of Giorgio Ballario’s novels featuring the Major of the Carabinieri Aldo Morosini (2008–2012), Davide Longo’s Un mattino a Irgalem (2001), Luciano Marrocu’s Debrà Libanòs (2002), and Andrea Camilleri’s La presa di Macallé (2003) will show how for contemporary Italian writers, as for many authors of late 19th- and 20th-century colonial novels, Africa often continues to be an empty space upon which to project European fantasies, regardless of whether the author’s intention is a critique or a celebration of empire. Only Camilleri manages to provide a more complex account of Italian imperialism by shifting his attention from the colonies themselves to the impact of colonialism upon the ‘motherland’, thus bringing into relief the constitutive function of colonialism in the formation of Fascist ideology.

Techniques of empire by land law: the case of the Italian colonies (nineteenth and twentieth centuries)

Land ownership and property registration played a special role in Italian colonialism, in which public and private interests mingled amidst the ambitions of colonising and economic exploitation. Through the legal system of land registration one can examine how European states, here in the context of Italy, used their colonies to adapt and experiment with the legal frameworks of land ownership. As will be shown in the article, what happened in the colonies might have been impossible to carry out in the European context. In the colonies the options varied between implementing a particular European land law used by a European state in its colonies, duly modified or updated, and a compromise between the already-existing land ownership structure and the European land law. The knowledge acquired by implementing different legal frameworks of landownership and land registration in the colonies conversely influenced the legal systems applied in continental Europe.

Publishing, politics and literary prizes: Nuruddin Farah’s reception in Italy

ABSTRACTIn this article I explore the publication of the translated novels of Nuruddin Farah in Italy. The Somali writer exhibits a strong Italian influence in his work and provides a decisive counter-narrative to historical misconceptions of Italian colonialism. Unfortunately this important voice of the formerly colonised people of Somalia in the land of their former colonial masters has largely been lost. In this article I show that Farah’s work has had limited influence in Italy because of a set of systemic economic and ideological pressures that restricted the publication and reception of his work in an Italy that was politically polarised in its opinion of the Siad Barre regime. Also examined in this article is the influence of the awarding of prestigious literary prizes to Farah and the effect this had of boosting the value of his later work to mainstream Italian publishers as well as the commoditisation of Farah’s works within the framework of specific practices associated with the marketing of African fiction in the West and in Italy.

African boundary politics: a case of Ethiopian-Eritrean boundary discord

This paper examined the boundary discord between Ethiopia and Eritrea over the region around Badme which started as a result of artificial boundaries created by the Italian imperialists. The study depicts the evolution of Italian colonialism in Ethiopia between 1936 and 1941. It exposes the differentials existing between the Muslim lowlanders and Christian highlanders. This paper further showcased the activities of armed resistance movements that emerged such as Eritrean Liberation Front (EFL) and Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front (TPLF). The paper discussed the root causes of the war, unlawful expulsion and destruction of houses of Eritreans. The paper concluded with the quest for peace to bring an end to the border discord between Ethiopia and Eritrea. Keywords: Ethiopia, Eritrea, Border Politics, Colonialism, Conflict Resolution