Italian Decolonization: Multidirectional Migrations, Multidirectional Memories

Abstract

Scholars have typically characterized Italy’s decolonization as abrupt and leaving relatively little trace in the peninsula either at the time or subsequently. This chapter challenges such interpretations by demonstrating the deeply felt impacts of repatriation by Italian settlers to the metropole at the time of events and the continued, if selective, visibility of these experiences in public debates during subsequent decades. In particular, the analysis examines films and novels, arenas for which most scholars posit an explicit silence about imperial defeat and repatriation that instead become displaced onto other themes. Re-reading such cultural artifacts raises the possibility of what Michael Rothberg has deemed the work of multidirectional and cross-referencing memories. At the same time, however, the analysis acknowledges the limited success of repatriated settlers in producing collective narratives of their experience, with separate circuits of memory and commemoration that continue to remain set apart from broader popular culture accounts of decolonization.