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CHAPTER 8: “Not a Country for Women, nor for Blacks”: Teaching Race and Gender in Italy between Colonial Heritages and New Perspectives Manuela Coppola and Sonia Sabelli It is only in recent times that Italy has started confronting its colonial past and the consequences of mass migration, thus realising how this history still shapes the present perception of racialised and gendered differences. Scholars from different disciplines have triggered a lively and fertile debate on Italian colonialism, stating in particular the impact of the colonial heritage on the contemporary experience of migration in terms of representation.The interconnections of colonial legacy and contemporary migration flows have long been on the agenda in many European countries—especially in England and France, often contributing to the negotiation and redefinition of national identities. However, due to the lack of a postcolonial critique and in view of a long history of invasions, internal migration and emigration, Italy has always perceived itself more as a colonised country than as a coloniser. As a matter of fact, Italian society has been characterised until recently by the absence of a critical debate on issues of race and gender. In our chapter we would like to suggest how the complicity with a repressed or unquestioned colonial heritage has heavily shaped the present social and political situation, generating particular and worrying weaknesses in the Italian school system . In this light, we seek to explore the existing gap between an emerging corpus of critical work on the persisting impact of colonialism on present-day racism and sexism, and the everyday practice of teaching to the new generations. However, the chapter also attempts to offer new perspectives on school curricula, mapping some “virtuous” examples of critical reflection and outlining possible future directions for a redefinition of Italian identities in terms of race and gender. In the last two decades, several scholars from different disciplines have started to reassess the crucial role of the legacy of Italian colonialism in the contemporary experience of migration, thus identifying a specific “strategic amnesia” as regards Italian colonial history.1 In what Sandra Ponzanesi has defined as “post143 1 See, for instance, Angelo Del Boca, L’Africa nella coscienza degli italiani (Roma–Bari: Laterza, 1992) and Italiani, brava gente? (Vicenza: Neri Pozza, 2005); Sandra Ponzanesi, “Il postcolonialismo italiano. colonial unconscious”,2 colonial history has been conveniently erased from Italian collective consciousness. Confining their colonial past to the vague memory of the Libyan “box of sand”—as the African country was called to emphasise the futility of the colonial achievement—many Italians still oscillate between repressed memory and nostalgia. Moreover, the revival of colonial clichés to deal with African alterity testifies to the persistence of biased representations which, as Alessandro Triulzi has suggested, “while including sanitized narratives of the country’s colonial past, exclude African migrants from full participation in cultural , social or political life”.3 Italian colonialism started in Northern Africa in the late 1870s—that is just after the birth of the nation, since Italy as a modern unified state has only existed since 1861. Although the colonised territories in Ethiopia, Eritrea, and Libya were lost after the Second World War, Somalia remained under an Italian administration until 1960.The construction of Italian identity during the colonial period has often relied on race as a marker of irredeemable alterity and threat (see Figure 8.1), as much as today Italianness and blackness are still mutually exclusive attributes.4 Moreover, if the intersection of race with gender has deeply affected the power relations between the coloniser and the colonised, nowadays gendered and racialised stereotypes informed by a colonial mentality are still active in the western multicultural metropolis, marking the differences between immigrants and citizens.5 Some recent studies have started to connect post-unification mass migration out of Italy to contemporary migration into Italy, stating that racism in Italy was not confined to the colonial period. Following the insights of Critical Whiteness Studies in a book significantly entitled Are ItaliansWhite?, Jennifer Guglielmo and Salvatore Salerno demonstrate that, during the experience of mass emigration in the last century, Italian Americans were not always perceived as quite white 144 Figlie dell’Impero e letteratura meticcia,” Quaderni del ‘900 4 (2004): 25–34; and Alessandro Triulzi, “Displacing the Colonial Event. Hybrid Memories of Postcolonial Italy,” Interventions 8, 3 (2006): 430–43. 2 Ponzanesi, “Il postcolonialismo italiano,” 26. 3 Triulzi, “Displacing the Colonial Event,” 433. 4 See Alberto Burgio, ed., Nel nome della razza. Il razzismo nella storia d’Italia...

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