Postcolonial Italy: Challenging National Homogeneity ed. by Cristina Lombardi-Diop and Caterina Romeo (review)

At a time in which postcolonialism and postcolonial studies have repeatedly been proclaimed or thought as dead, as suggested in the 2007 PMLA roundtable discussion “The End of Postcolonial Theory?,” Postcolonial Italy: Challenging National Homogeneity represents an important contribution to the ongoing debate on postcolonial studies and to the revitalization of the field. Interweaving postcolonial theory with political, gender and critical race theory, the volume revisits and expands on the notion of postcolonialism from the perspective of Italy, which with a few exceptions has rarely been considered a postcolonial nation both in Italian and comparative studies. Because of its history and geographical position in the Southern Mediterranean, Italy constitutes a privileged observatory of the enduring ramifications of European colonialism in today’s world and of North-South relations, Mediterranean exchanges and global migrations. The way in which the volume reformulates the postcolonial condition is not limited to the colonial and postcolonial relation between Italy and its former colonies, particularly in East Africa, but includes Italian emigration to North Africa and the Americas, Italy’s internal colonialism known as the “Southern Question,” and immigration from territories that once belonged to other European colonial powers (which Teresa Fiore in the volume terms “indirect postcoloniality”). The scholarship gathered in the volume successfully investigates the intricate network of correlations existing among these various enunciations of the “postcolonial.” Ultimately, it seeks to demonstrate the lasting effects of modern colonial capitalism and structures of power in today’s global world (racism, nationalism, economic exploitation, legal discrimination), thus presenting the postcolonial condition as both transhistorical and transnational.

Organized into four major thematic sections, the volume gathers 18 interdisciplinary chapters by leading international scholars. Robert Young opens the book with a somewhat celebratory evaluation of Italy’s contribution to the formation of an anticolonial thought and to the development of an Italian body of postcolonial and political theory, referencing the work of Antonio Gramsci, Giorgio Agamben and Antonio Negri.

In Part I, “European and Global Trajectories,” Sandro Mezzadra and Miguel Mellino delve into Italy’s involvement in the spreading of colonial-capitalist modernity and in the racialization of laws, systems of surveillance and labor in Europe, while Teresa Fiore explores the Italian role in the context of global migrations, particularly Brazilian immigration to Italy. Sandra Ponzanesi’s “The Postcolonial Turn in Italian Studies” is a particularly original insight into a “comparative turn in postcolonial studies.” From a strong comparative and multi-focal perspective, Ponzanesi locates the Italian postcolonial in the context of European, lesser-known postcolonialisms (French, German and Dutch), elaborating a new critical perspective that engages with Anglophone as well as non-Anglophone postcolonial theory.

Part II, “Shared Memories, Contested Proximities,” explores memories and representations of Italian colonialism in a series of literary and filmic texts, facing the absence of a meaningful decolonizing moment in Italian national history and the long-standing failure of Italian memory to come to terms with its colonial past. While Alessandro Triulzi, Derek Duncan and Barbara Spackman’s essays challenge the idea of national identity through the inclusion of the colonial relation, Giovanna Trento and Roberto Derobertis revisit the notions of literary classic, national canon and aesthetic values in view of the interactions existing between external and internal colonialisms, and between the subaltern condition of colonized subjects in Africa and that of Southern Italian peasants.

Strongly anchored in critical race theory, Part III, “Intimations and Intimacies of Race,” investigates the racial discourse and representation of whiteness, blackness and interracial relations in cinema and literature. Co-editor Cristina Lombardi-Diop opens the section with a critical discussion of Italy’s ambivalent nature as both a postracial colorblind society and a frontline of European racism. Áine O’Healy reveals how supposedly anti-racist filmic narratives of interracial intimacy reflect the existence of racial, ethnic and national boundaries. Rosetta Caponetto complements O’Healy’s essay by exploring the reinterpretation of the figure of the colonial Black Venus in 1970s Italian cinema and in the context of...