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The Italian Postcolonial: A Manifesto | Cristina Lombardi-Diop and Caterina Romeo

Temporal and Spatial Trajectories

Italy, like other European countries, has undergone an epochal transformation as a postcolonial country in the wake of the fall of the Berlin Wall and as a consequence of the demographic and social changes brought about by mass immigration from the global South. Building an intellectual and theoretical framework that can engender a debate on what constitutes the postcolonial condition of contemporary Italy is the goal of this manifesto. Since the two collections we recently edited — Postcolonial Italy (2012) andL’Italia postcoloniale (2014) — came out, we have been engaging with the response they solicited both in Europe and the United States.1 If the volumes have encountered general enthusiasm, some scholars, mostly from English departments, have shown skepticism and asked why we employed a postcolonial perspective to read contemporary Italy, considering that the postcolonial is dead. To them, we were trying to resurrect a corpse, a body that no longer harboured any life.

Such a reaction is paradoxical, especially if one considers the tragically high numbers of those who continue to die in the attempt to reach Europe by crossing the Sahara and the Mediterranean. So, we ask, is the postcolonial really dead? Are the migrants who died and will continue to die during the perilous journey to Europe dead twice, then?2 If the postcolonial seems dead for countries such as Great Britain and India, where this critical paradigm was born, it is certainly not dead for a country such as Italy, which is now, more than ever, dealing with the ghastly consequences of the global readjustments brought about by the decolonization of the former European empires in the 1950s and 1960s. If we limit our analysis to Great Britain, a country that holds a dominant position within Europe in terms of postcolonial theory and criticism, it is fair to argue that the original paradigm has probably exhausted its vitality. France, the other major European empire, has always shown resistance to the deployment of a postcolonial perspective to interpret its contemporaneity. In the case of Italy, however, a discontinuity exists between the emergence of an Italian postcoloniality and the British and French histories of post-empire, as migratory flows were already arriving in those countries in the 1950s and 1960s directly from previous colonies. Italian postcoloniality, instead, must be understood in a post-Cold War and globalized European context, and is characterized by indirectpostcolonial migrations.

What does it mean, then, to speak of postcoloniality in Europe today? The publication of four volumes in the past few years, entitled Postkoloniaal Nederland, Postkoloniale Schweiz, The Postcolonial Low Countries, and Postcolonial Germany reinforces our idea that the postcolonial is far from dead in Europe — and beyond — testifying to a significant European trend that has started only recently.3 As the above mentioned titles show, there are some European countries — which, like Italy, have not been traditionally considered as postcolonial, either because their colonial history was relatively short (Italy and Germany), or because they did not have a colonial history at all (Switzerland) — that have nonetheless been defined by the authors and editors of these recent volumes as postcolonial. Postcoloniality, then has been elected as the defining condition of those countries today, a very important move, we believe, both at a cultural and at a political level. By this we do not mean to suggest that Italy, Switzerland, and Germany are postcolonial in the same way, or that these countries adopt the same paradigm of postcoloniality; quite the opposite, in fact. While the four volumes mentioned above highlight the sense of proximity existing among European countries — suggesting that others might be willing and ready to join the list — they also point to the specificity of each nation’s experience of postcoloniality at the level of both historical and cultural formation.

The wealth of scholarship produced in the past decade (or so) in fields that contribute to creating an Italian postcolonial discourse testifies to the fact that Italian postcolonial studies — both in Italy and abroad — is alive and thriving. These studies read the subalternity of the South as an internal colonial condition; they apply the postcolonial critical paradigm to scrutinize the cultural subalternity of emigrants in Italy’s ‘colonies’ around the world; they connect trans-Mediterranean and transoceanic migrations; they place the Mediterranean at the centre of contemporary diaspora studies, thus connecting the central position that the Mediterranean has acquired recently to its centrality in antiquity; they highlight Gramsci’s emphasis on anticapitalist and anticolonial struggles as a necessary step toward any liberation; they include emigration, colonization, intranational migrations and contemporary immigration within the same continuum; they connect Italian colonial history with historical processes of racialization and contemporary racisms; they reflect on how contemporary postcolonial cultural production creates a sense of cultural belonging that strongly questions and redefines the biological attribution of citizenship; they formulate new conceptualizations of blackness and its intersection with Italianness; they connect the contemporary exploitation of black women — especially as care- givers and sex workers — with their exploitation in colonial societies.

Central to our critical endeavour is the question of what constitutes the postcolonial condition of contemporary Italy and in what way it is similar to, or dissimilar from, other European countries. Similarly to most European countries, postcolonial studies applied to the Italian context reposition colonial history and its legacy at the centre of the debate on contemporaneity and connects them to transnational immigrations, also highlighting how relationships of power created by colonialism are reproduced and reinforced in contemporary postcolonial societies. The historical examination of the Italian past, however, unlike that of other European countries, necessarily includes mass emigration (and, in more than one sense, emigrants as ‘colonized subjects’) and the Southern Question (as ‘internal colonialism’). Moreover, questions of historicity and temporality are crucial to the Italian debate, since the postcolonial era began decades after the colonies were lost, and the decolonization process did not begin simultaneously in all the Italian colonies. In the period between 1890 and 1943, Italy claimed colonial rights over Eritrea, Somalia, parts of Libya, Ethiopia, the Dodecanese Islands, and Albania. The Paris Peace Treaty in 1947 officially marked the termination of Italy’s colonial possessions, but the colonies had already been lost after the Italian Army was defeated by the British Army in East Africa in 1941 and in Libya in 1943, while the Italian colonies in Albania and the Dodecanese Islands were taken over by the German Army in 1943. Even after the end of colonialism, however, Italy entertained other kinds of colonial relations both at a political level, as was the case for 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. The different nature of the decolonization process in the Italian colonies — which was not the result of the periphery rebelling against the metropole, but rather the outcome of the weakening, and later the defeat, of Fascism — sets Italy aside from other colonial powers and creates different postcolonial trajectories.

The history of Italian colonialism cannot be examined separately from Italy’s history of emigration, a specific trait that informs the analysis of Italian coloniality and postcoloniality. Italy has had a long history of both transatlantic and trans- Mediterranean migrations. Between 1876 and 1976, approximately twenty-six million Italians left their nation, thus establishing a record for international migration. The fact that emigration became a mass phenomenon in Italy soon after Unification (1861–70), and that a decade later Italy started acquiring coastal territories on the Red Sea (1882), soon to become the first Italian formal colony of Eritrea (1890), highlights the importance of transnational phenomena in the process of nation building.

Similarly to other European contexts, transnational immigrations play a key role in shaping Italy’s contemporary postcolonial condition. Unlike other former imperial nations in Europe, however, which in the 1950s and 1960s began to receive immigration flows from their former colonies, Italy remained an emigrant country well into the 1970s. International migrations with the support of bilateral agreements were directed mostly toward Northern Europe — Germany, France, Switzerland, Belgium — while intranational migrations brought Southerners to the industrialized North. Although they were Italian nationals, here they were treated as second-class citizens in the labour and housing market of Northern cities and can therefore be considered as ‘colonial migrants’.

In the 1980s Italy also became a destination country for global migrants without ever ceasing to be an emigrant nation. Unlike Britain, France, and the Netherlands, transnational immigration to Italy did not start soon after decolonization and (mainly) it did not just reverse colonial routes — Italy did not experience large-scale spontaneous immigration from its former colonies. This helped to corroborate Italy’s self-perception as a demographically and culturally homogeneous nation. Due to its central position in southern Europe and in the Mediterranean, Italy has historically been entangled in diverse (and contrasting) geopolitical trajectories. The North/South duality, so central to Italy’s self-identity, was matched during the postwar period by the creation of a transnational East/West divide. After the fall of the Berlin Wall (1989) Italy has also become the destination of Eastern migrations, thus assuming again the central position in the Mediterranean it had in antiquity, and constituting the point of intersection of different trajectories coming from the South and from the East. By the end of the 1990s, Italy had one of the most diverse immigrant populations in Europe, with migrants from Europe, North Africa, sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, China, and Southeast Asia. At the end of 2012, migrants constituted 7.4% of the Italian population (4,387,721 foreign residents out of a total population of 59,685,227), with the most numerous communities being represented by Romanians, Albanians, Moroccans, Chinese, and Ukrainians.4 The social diversity that new migrants and second generations contribute to creating translates into a cultural production that simultaneously constitutes part of Italian culture and challenges traditional understandings of it, fostering a notion of national identity and culture rooted in transnationalism and dis-homogeneity.

The Italian postcolonial condition has recently been complicated by migratory flows of a different nature, which include specific types of return migration and new forms of emigration. Descendants of Italian emigrants, who live in developing countries from which migratory flows to Italy generally originate (such as Brazil, Uruguay, Argentina, to name only a few), have recently profited from the privilege of Italian citizenship, bestowed upon them by the biological principle of descent, to migrate back to Italy.5 These return migrants are citizens from a legal standpoint; however, Italians often fail to perceive the difference between them and illegal immigrants, mainly because of their diasporic history of intermarriage with individuals from their communities of origin, their lack of familiarity with the host culture, and their (often) poor knowledge of the Italian language, which creates in them a sense of disillusionment and alienation. This phenomenon complicates the very notion of citizenship, exposing the contradictions and incongruousness inherent in the principle of jus sanguinis that regulates its attribution, showing how everyday practices are as relevant in creating a sense of (non) belonging as are legal principles.

While the economic crisis of the past few years has caused immigration to decrease (in 2012, 321,000 migrants entered the country, which amounted to 27.7% less than in 2007), emigration has recently become a relevant national phenomenon again. Unemployment in Italy has reached its highest level since 1977 (13.6% in March 2014, but the percentage rises up to 46% for people aged 15–24). This, in turn, has ignited a new wave of international emigrations — (in 2012, 68,000 people emigrated from Italy, 36% more than in 2011), which, differently from emigrations in the past, includes large masses of young and educated people (94,000 Italians aged 15–34 have migrated abroad from 2009 to 2013) — and of intranational migration from the South to the North.6

Critical Trajectories

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It is our belief that such a complex historical and geographical framework requires an engaged scholarship capable of connecting disparate phenomena across time and space in order to meet, in a truly multidisciplinary and intersectional effort, the challenge that Italian postcoloniality poses to Italian Studies and to our understanding of italianità. This involves widening the scope of our academic inquiries beyond the present in order to re-read the historical formation of italianità and broaden its definition as a way of transforming it. It is precisely through a postcolonial approach, inclusive of the multiple processes of extraterritorial conquest, expansion, and migration, that one can comprehend the complex, transnational history of Italy’s cultural identity. We believe that an engaged scholarship ought to aim at redefining the very notion of italianità by taking into account Italy’s diasporic scattering and the dissemination of its political, social, and cultural models within but also beyond its national borders at different historical moments: in particular, as indicated above, during the epochal mass emigrations to the Americas, North Africa and later Northern Europe, the colonization of Africa, and the internal migrations from the South to the North.

The specific ‘emigrant’ nature of Italy’s colonization in Africa requires a more attentive study of the overlapping of emigration and colonization in Italian modern history.7 The word colonia, used in Italian to refer both to Italian possessions overseas and communities of emigrants around the world, signals the heterogeneous nature of the diasporic flows out of the Italian peninsula during the nineteenth century. The newly unified nation-state found a sense of national identity and culture while projecting itself far beyond its territorial borders for both conquest, community settlement, and neighborhood building. These coloniecertainly disseminated linguistic and cultural features inherent to the concept of italianità, shaped and defined not only by national and metropolitan phenomena but also by the remarkable continuity existing between intranational migrations, the colonial enterprise, as well as transoceanic and trans-Mediterranean migrations.

In light of such complex migratory and transnational history, Italy, we argue, is a country susceptible to both ‘direct’ and ‘indirect’ forms of colonialism and postcolonialism, complicated also by conditions of subalternity generated by emigration and internal colonialism. The ‘indirect’ nature of Italian colonialism is evident in countries such as Tunisia; once a colony of ancient Rome, at the turn of the twentieth century Tunisia had a population of eighty thousand Italian emigrants, although it was never an Italian colony.8Since the late 1980s, Tunisian emigrants have chosen Italy as a destination country and have contributed to the creation of an established ‘indirect’ postcolonial culture in the peninsula. Such an example underscores a connection between ‘indirect colonialism’ and ‘indirect postcolonialism’ and highlights the complexity of (post) colonial relationships as well as of trans-Mediterranean migrations. The legacy of Italy’s colonial past in East Africa and Libya (‘direct postcolonialism’) intertwines with contemporary global immigrations from countries other than the former colonies (‘indirect postcolonialism’), and is complicated by the legacy of the mass emigrations to the Americas and Northern Europe (a history of marginalized, subaltern people, for the most part), as well as by the Italian South’s subalternity vis-à-vis the North (‘internal colonialism’). Differently from other European nations, Italy experienced this double subalternity while simultaneously carrying on an imperialist agenda. A postcolonial discourse analysis — attentive to the strategic use of language, to the dichotomy between metropole and periphery, and to the question of cultural hegemony — can help explain, for instance, the centrality of the condition of double subalternity characterizing Italian American culture in respect to both Italian ‘metropolitan’ and US mainstream cultures.9 To complicate this picture further is the wealth of research on ‘ethnic whites’ that has shown how the mechanisms of racial identification of European immigrants (including Italian-Americans) were often based on the moving of the colour line towards the assimilation of such ethnic communities within the white mainstream. Such social processes gave them access to a series of legal and political privileges and positioned them above other groups, including African Americans, so therefore in a higher position in the hierarchies of the US colour line.10

Discriminated as Italians yet privileged as white, Italian Americans’ ‘state of suspended colonization’ within the US social mainstream also had important consequences for the idea of italianità, as it generated a reactive series of nationalist claims and imperialist ideologies, ‘an unconscious imperialist faith’11 that still feeds the notion of the Italian patria as a privileged family of shared bloodlines. Such an outlook complicates notions of subalternity and hegemony, as well as the very definition of Italian postcolonialism. The risk implicit in this concept of diasporic italianità is all too evident: it admits those who belong by blood but excludes all others, regarded as those who do not fit in. That is why we believe that diaspora studies in an Italian context cannot marginalize the radical implications that a postcolonial vision of Italy can offer to Italian and Italian-American Studies.

Finally, Italy’s internal colonialism provides an example of how postcolonial discourse may emerge not only as an emanation of the colonial periphery, but as an expression of subalternity from within the nation-state, and therefore outside traditional geographies of power that have historically juxtaposed Western hegemonic and Third World nations, as well as white and nonwhite subjects. A Saidian approach (mediated through Gramsci) to the discourse on the Mezzogiorno contributes to the view of the South of Italy as historically subjected to mechanisms akin to those inscribed within the disciplinary and discursive practice of Orientalism and, primarily, to a Manichean vision of the North/South divide.12 A postcolonial approach to nationhood also enables us to view the historical hiatus between the North and South of Italy as part of a larger discourse on the ethnic and racial formation of nations emanating from Europe during the second half of the nineteenth century, one in which the definition of the meridionali was based on racializing oppositional categories that defined the Italian national citizen and the Southern subject in relation to the colonial, African one. The emerging studies on Italian whiteness find a specific realm of application especially in the examination of the Southern question, Italy’s internal migrations, and the affirmation of hegemonic whiteness both in relation to the South of Italy and in relation to Africa.13 All of these connections, we argue, set Italy apart from other European postcolonialities and compel us to emphasize how an essential component of the postcolonial condition in Italy is the shift from the historical categories of racism to a new conceptualization of blackness and whiteness that invests the very idea of Italianness.

To affirm Italy’s postcoloniality, therefore, also means to realize that the formation of Italian national identity has structured itself around lines of race and gender. In our opinion, there is no postcolonial approach to Italy’s history and culture without the methodology of intersectionality, which takes into account different categories of oppression in their intersecting co-presence, rather than considering them separately from one another or simply adding them to one another. Thus, intersectionality compels us to study the contemporary interaction between native Italian women and migrant and postcolonial women for an understanding of how the latter decentre the ‘grand narratives’ of Italian feminism; this awareness can enable us to deconstruct the strongly marked essentialism characteristic of Italian feminist theory of the 1970s and 1980s, an essentialism that often leaves the male/female dichotomy largely unquestioned. Intersectionality also allows for an exploration of the intersecting ways in which migrant women are racialized, sexualized, and marginalized based on a number of factors, including religion, sexual orientation, social class, and citizenship (or the lack thereof). An intersectional, postcolonial approach to gender issues is currently allowing Italian and international scholars to explore the relationship between Italian feminism and migrant women as well as the intersection of race, whiteness, and gender in Italy, with a special emphasis on domestic labor, sex work, masculinity, queerness, homophobia, and homo-nationalism in Italian colonial and postcolonial contexts.

A postcolonial approach that maintains a focus on the intersecting categories of race and gender also contributes to defining what white femininity is today and what it has been historically in the development of an Italian identity. Studies on the intersecting hierarchies of racial and gender power in Italian colonial societies have emphasized how the sexual reproductivity of Italian women has played a fundamental role in the articulation of the racial identity of Italians; such a legacy has also impacted the dominant tendencies in the constitution of family and domestic life from the postwar period up to today. Colonial societies offered an opportunity of mobility of traditional gender roles for Italian women, as their sexuality became a key factor in the regulation and control of white male sexuality and the racial unity of the family as a whole. Further research in this direction could unravel the complex legacy of colonial domesticity and how it impinges upon postcolonial relations between Italian women and migrant women at present.

Our approach to race relations in the colonial and postcolonial context conceives of race as a process that creates discreet identities for both self and others and therefore requires the implementation of studies attentive to the simultaneous deployment of categories constitutive of both whiteness and blackness. In the case of Italy, the postcolonial brings race to the fore, countering the attempt at erasing the visibility of race as a category of identity formation. The persistence of the principle of jus sanguinis has contributed to maintaining the idea of italianità, despite the historical dispersion of Italians through emigration. As the basis for the right of citizenship, the jus sanguinis extends this right to the descendants of emigrants, but denies it to second generations of diverse origin born and raised in Italy. As a result of this exclusion, postcolonial subjects identify with local and global cultures, but not with the national one. For them, a sense of national belonging is not linked to legal status, but rather to new ways of being Italian, whether by virtue of being born in Italy, through everyday experiences and practices, or through participation in the educational system and a dynamic use of the national language. Hence it is not the legal principle of descent that holds the truth of the migrants’ sense of belonging, but rather the shared postcolonial cultural practices that transcend the biologically determined idea of the nation. We are highly critical of a concept ofitalianità that continues to support exclusivist racializing practices by privileging the principle of bloodlines for admission into the national family, and we envision its possible transformation in light of the expanding definition of nationhood brought about by current demographic and cultural changes.

Finally, a postcolonial awareness opens up new perspectives on Italian cultural history by underlining the need for a reassessment of the Italian cultural and literary canon, especially if one considers the unquestionable contribution of Italian civilization to Western culture since antiquity. In ways similar to those pursued by Said and others with regard to the British literary and cultural canon, a postcolonial critique of Italian cultural modernity can reveal the complicity of the national culture with nationalist and imperialist ideologies. Such a critique helps to unravel the cultural assumptions of a Eurocentric perspective that have shaped Italian modern cultural history and casts light onto the ways in which the colonial experience in Africa marked the accession of Italy’s national culture to modernity. Rereading Italian literature and culture through a postcolonial lens also means re-defining what culture is, as the signs of the dissemination of colonial memories and ideology are not only found within textual archives or ‘high’ culture, but in many other sites of cultural and identity production, such as popular films, advertisements, maps, monuments, street names, tourist sites, visual conceptions of beauty and the body, and in a number of physical and symbolic places where the critical gaze can find traces of its visible or invisible presence.

Re-defining what constitutes ‘culture’ within an Italian context also means breaking away from stifling academic practices that still govern Italian academia, dictating what can be investigated and what not, within the strict confines of narrowly defined disciplinary fields. In Italian universities, interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary projects are still regarded with suspicion, while traditional approaches to literature and culture dominate the field of italianistica and severely curtail any attempt at innovation. In this field, the risk of exclusion and delegitimization is constantly looming, and it materializes through apparently innocuous or unrelated strategies, which include considering the literature that Italian postcolonial writers produce as sociological explorations rather than literature in its own right; cataloguing their texts as ‘foreign literature’ and therefore deeming the study of their work as legitimate only in comparative literature courses, rather than Italian courses; keeping scholars in the field at the margins of the academic system by regarding postcolonial studies, race studies, and gender studies as lesser fields of inquiry and publications in these fields as irrelevant for the advancement of academic careers; considering the postcolonial exclusively as an Anglophone theoretical and cultural paradigm that has no relevance for Italy or, if it does, as a nonetheless ‘minor’ and insignificant one. In conservative Italy, fighting the cultural de-legitimization of postcolonial studies is a necessary political battle to promote social and cultural change through the creation of larger models of inclusivity that are truly representative of Italy’s contemporary postcolonial condition.

Although the authors conceived and developed this manifesto together, Caterina Romeo wrote the first section titled ‘Temporal and Spatial Trajectories’, while Cristina Lombardi-Diop wrote the second section titled ‘Critical Trajectories’.