Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Race, Gender, and the Early Colonial Imaginary

  • Chapter
  • First Online:
Race, Nation and Gender in Modern Italy

Part of the book series: Mapping Global Racisms ((MGR))

Abstract

Giuliani investigates the colour lines that during the Liberal era (1861–1922) crossed the Mediterranean of Italy’s colonial enterprise and the Atlantic Ocean of its diaspora, reconnecting the internal social divisions to their transnational extensions. Visual representations of southern Italians and colonised women and men in propaganda at the time of the Italo-Turkish war, as well as in films (e.g., Cabiria, 1914), operas (Gioacchino Rossini’s Othello, Giacomo Puccini’s Madama Butterfly and Giuseppe Verdi’s Aida), criminal records and colonial photographs, along with the inherent tension between exoticisation and monstrification, are analysed to describe the relational process in the gendered construction of hegemonic whiteness.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Log in via an institution
Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 89.00
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Hardcover Book
USD 119.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Durable hardcover edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Notes

  1. 1.

    Alberto M. Banti , La nazione del Risorgimento. Parentela, santità e onore alle origini dell’Italia unita (Torino: Einaudi, 2000), 23–6.

  2. 2.

    Drawing on Benedict Anderson’s idea of “imagined community,” Gabriele Proglio, among others, employs this concept in his analysis of the multilayered character of language in the construction of the national imaginary. See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (New York: Verso, 2006); Gabriele Proglio, Memorie oltre confine. La letteratura postcoloniale italiana in prospettiva storica (Verona: ombre corte, 2012).

  3. 3.

    As Silvana Patriarca and Mary Gibson have noted, the use of the terms race, stock, and lineage had been widespread since the Risorgimento. Nonetheless, it was only with the emergence of The Southern Question that these terms took on the purely biological meaning that characterised them from the end of the 1860s onwards. Patriarca , Italian Vices, 69; Mary Gibson, Born to Crime: Cesare Lombroso and the Origins of Biological Criminology (Westport: Praeger, 2002), 140–6.

  4. 4.

    Gilroy , Against Race, 83. See also Gaia Giuliani, “Paul Gilroy e il dibattito sul razzismo,” Filosofia politica, no. 2 (2003): 269–84.

  5. 5.

    This expression came to be widely used in the fascist period to refer to the territorial colonisation of Italy’s depressed and uninhabited areas, borrowing an idea popular with certain scholars and politicians from the Liberal era (such as Edoardo Pantano). A permanent committee for internal migration was established in 1926. See Carl Ipsen, Dictating Demography: The Problem of Population in Fascist Italy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 94–117.

  6. 6.

    Stefano Gallo, “Riempire l’Italia: le migrazioni nei progetti di colonizzazione interna, 1868–1919,” Meridiana 75 (2012): 59–83; Maria Elena Protasi and Eugenio Sonnino, “Politiche di popolamento: colonizzazione interna e colonizzazione demografica nell’Italia liberale e fascista,” Popolazione e storia 4, no. 1 (2003): 91–138.

  7. 7.

    On the conflation of internal and external colonialism in government policies of demographic mobility, see Stefano Gallo, “Emigrazione, colonialismo, colonizzazioni interne: appunti sulle politiche della mobilità territoriale dello Stato italiano,” in Lontano vicino. Metropoli e colonie nella costruzione dello Stato nazionale italiano, eds. Giovanni Ruocco and Gianluca Bascherini (Napoli: Jovene, 2016), 180–99. For a discussion of parliamentary debates and political views on the “two Italies,” see Carlo Petraccone, Le due civiltà. Settentrionali e meridionali nella storia d’Italia dal 1860 al 1914 (Roma and Bari: Laterza, 2000). On the infantilisation of the internal “backward,” see Stewart-Steinberg, The Pinocchio Effect, 1–6. On this topic, see also Joseph Pugliese, “Whiteness and the Blackening of Italy: La guerra cafona, Extracommunitari and Provisional Street Justice,” in PORTAL Journal of Multidisciplinary International Studies 5, no. 2 (2008): 1–8, http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal.

  8. 8.

    Fulvio Cammarano, “Il modello costituzionale inglese nell’Italia liberale,” in Le costituzioni anglosassoni e l’Europa. Riflessi e dibattito tra ’800 e ’900, ed. Eugenio Capozzi (Soveria Mannelli: Rubbettino, 2002), 109.

  9. 9.

    See Fulvio Cammarano, “The Nationalization of Politics and the Politicization of the Nation in Liberal Italy,” in The New History of the Italian South, ed. Robert Lumley and Jonathan Morris (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1997), 148–55.

  10. 10.

    Donna R. Gabaccia, Italy’s Many Diasporas (Washington, DC: University of Washington Press, 2000), 35–42; Fulvio Cammarano, Storia dell’Italia liberale (Roma and Bari: Laterza, 2011), 17; Patriarca , Italian Vices, 39–48.

  11. 11.

    The majority of Italians, as stated by Francesco De Sanctis. See De Sanctis in Stewart-Steinberg, The Pinocchio Effect, 16.

  12. 12.

    For a critical perspective on the complex dualism between North and South, see John Dickie, Darkest Italy: The Nation and Stereotypes of the Mezzogiorno, 1860–1900 (New York: S. Martin’s Press, 1999), 1–23.

  13. 13.

    Nani, Ai confini della nazione, 17ff.

  14. 14.

    Mirzoeff , The Right to Look.

  15. 15.

    Raymond Corbey, “Ethnographic showcases: account and vision,” in Sandrine Lemaire, Pascal Blanchard, Nicolas Bancel, Gilles Boëtsch, et al., eds., Human Zoos : Science and Spectacle in the Age of Empire (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2008), 102.

  16. 16.

    That was the case with Italian psychiatry, as argued by historian Chiara Beccalossi, “Madness and Sexual Psychopathies as the Magnifying Glass of the Normal: Italian Psychiatry and Sexuality 1880–1910,” Social History of Medicine 26 (2013): 1–23. See also Female Sexual Inversion: Same-Sex Desires in Italian and British Sexology, ca. 1870–1920 (London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).

  17. 17.

    Laura Schettini, Il gioco delle parti. Travestimenti e paure sociali tra Otto e Novecento (Firenze-Milano: Le Monnier/Mondadori Education, 2013); on Lombroso , see Schettini, Il gioco delle parti, 179–80; see also Schettini, “Polizia scientifica e anomalie sessuali nei primi decenni del Novecento,” Rivista sperimentale di freniatria 138, no. 2 (2014): 43–58, and Schettini, “Immagini truccate, Foto di travestiti conservate presso il Museo criminologico di Roma,” Zapruder, no. 5 (2004): 65–9. On the importance of photography as a source for historic research, see Adolfo Mignemi, Lo sguardo e l’immagine. La fotografia come documento storico (Torino: Bollati Boringhieri, 2003).

  18. 18.

    See Vito Teti, La razza maledetta (Roma: Manifestolibri, 1993) as well as Roberto Maiocchi, Scienza italiana e razzismo fascista (Scandicci: La Nuova Italia, 1999) and Maiocchi, Scienza e Fascismo.

  19. 19.

    Arthur De Gobineau, Essai sur l’inegalité des races humaines (Paris: Didot Frères, 1853–1855), 4: 163–4.

  20. 20.

    See Micheal D. Biddiss, Father of Racist Ideology: The Social and Political Thought of Count Gobineau (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1970). Giuseppe Sergi’s research explicitly opposed this theory.

  21. 21.

    See Fabrizio De Donno, “La Razza Ario-Mediterranea,” Interventions 8, no. 3 (2006): 396; Gaia Giuliani, “Whose Whiteness? Cultural Dis/locations between Italy and Australia,” in Transmediterranean. Diasporas, Histories, Geopolitical Spaces, ed. Joseph Pugliese (Brussels: Peter Lang, 2010).

  22. 22.

    On this issue, see Giuliani, “L’italiano negro,” especially the footnote on page 30.

  23. 23.

    See Stephen J. Gould, extremely reliable on anthropometric issues. Gould, The Mismeasure of Man (New York: W. W. Norton & Company Inc., 1981).

  24. 24.

    Cesare Lombroso, In Calabria 1862–1897. Studii con aggiunte del Dr. Giuseppe Pelaggi (Catania: Giannotta, 1898), 61.

  25. 25.

    Francesca di Pasquale, “La colonizzazione penitenziaria nella costruzione nazionale. Madrepatria e oltremare a confronto,” in Vicino lontano. Metropoli e colonie nella costruzione dello Stato nazionale italiano, eds. Giovanni Ruocco and Gianluca Bascherini (Napoli: Jovene, 2016), 170.

  26. 26.

    Unlike racial analyses developed in countries such as France, Germany, and England, Lombroso’s classification did not take into account the Semitic component; indeed, Lombroso (who was Jewish) and other notable scholars such as Enrico Ferri and Alfredo Niceforo refused to include it in a mere biological classification. The distinction between criminals and civilised races was thus made along the black-white axis, in some cases suggesting that it was biologically and historically impossible to include “coloured races” in civilised life. This was to be the task of the forensic police, trained to identify, isolate, and render harmless all defective subjects with the tools provided by criminal anthropology. See Gibson, Born to Crime, 151–8.

  27. 27.

    Guido Abbattista, Umanità in mostra. Esposizioni etniche e invenzioni esotiche in Italia (1880–1940) (Trieste: Edizioni Università di Trieste, 2013), 35; Lemaire et al., Human Zoos.

  28. 28.

    Silvana Palma, “Mirror with a memory? La confezione dell’immagine coloniale,” in L’impero nel cassetto. L’Italia coloniale tra album privati e archivi pubblici, eds. Paolo Bertella Farnetti, Adolfo Mignemi, and Alessandro Triulzi (Milano and Udine: Mimesis, 2013), 81–107.

  29. 29.

    Cesare Lombroso, “Criminal Anthropology,” Twentieth Century Practice, no. 12 (1897): 369–423.

  30. 30.

    See Aliza S. Wong, Race and the Nation in Liberal Italy 1861–1911. Meridionalism, Empire, and Diaspora (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 121–4; Giuliani, “Whose Whiteness,” 130–3. On American racial doctrines integrating elements of Italian anthropology to select among prospective immigrants, see Peter d’Agostino, “Craniums, Criminals, and the ‘Cursed Race’: Italian Anthropology in American Racial Thought, 1861–1924,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 44 (2002): 319–44; see also the work on Lombroso by Nelson Moe, “The Mediterranean Comes to Ellis Island. The Southern Question in the World,” California Italian Studies 1, no. 1 (2010): 1–5.

  31. 31.

    For a bibliography on the Australian debate, see Gaia Giuliani, “Fantasie di bianchezza nell’Australia federale,” Studi Culturali 7, no. 1 (2010): 141–60; on the reception of Lombroso in Australia, see Gaia Giuliani, “Lombroso l’australiano. Costruzione della bianchezza tra Otto e Novecento,” Zapruder—Storie in movimento, no. 28 (2012): 25–39. These studies were also presented at the symposium “Global Lombroso ? Eredità e persistenze del discorso sulla ‘razza’ nella costruzione delle scienze sociali,” Rome, Biblioteca di storia moderna e contemporanea, May 13, 2014. On his reception in the United States, see David M. Horton and Katherine E. Rich, eds., The Criminal Anthropological Writings of Cesare Lombroso : Published in the English Language Periodical Literature During the Late 19th and Early 20th Centuries (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press, 2004); on the influence of Lombroso’s and Sergi’s works on the one drop rule, see Tatiana Petrovich Njegosh, “Gli italiani sono bianchi? Per una storia culturale della linea del colore in Italia,” in Petrovich Njegosh and Scacchi, Parlare di razza, 22.

  32. 32.

    Gian Antonio Stella and Emilio Franzina, “Brutta gente. Il razzismo anti-italiano,” in Storia dell’emigrazione italiana. Arrivi, ed. Piero Bevilacqua, Andreina Clementi, and Emilio Franzina (Roma: Donzelli, 2002), 283–311. For a more extensive bibliography, see also Giuliani, “Whose Whiteness.”

  33. 33.

    See Gabaccia , Italy’s Many Diasporas, 3; Maria S. Garroni, “Little Italies,” in Storia dell’emigrazione italiana. Partenze, ed. Piero Bevilacqua, Andreina Clementi, and Emilio Franzina (Roma: Donzelli, 2002), 207–34. See also Emilio Franzina, L’immaginario degli emigranti. Miti e raffigurazioni dell’esperienza italiana all’estero tra i due secoli (Paese: PAGVS, 1992), xvii–xviii.

  34. 34.

    I use the term Southernness without quotation marks, although this concept, too, is still understood as a social and intellectual construction that is highly discretional and open to interpretation.

  35. 35.

    As Mark I. Choate has pointed out, beginning in the 1860s, the Dante Alighieri and other associations, as well as Italian newspapers and cinema, served to enhance the process through which people became familiar with the meaning of Italianness and cultural-historical belonging. While it is true that “despite their bitter divisions and infighting, outside the Italian peninsula these migrants were hailed as ‘Italians,’” it is likewise true that their sense of belonging continued to be mediated by those “divisions.” Michael I. Choate, Emigrant Nation: The Making of Italy Abroad (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008), 127–8.

  36. 36.

    See Alfredo Niceforo, Italiani del Nord e Italiani del Sud (Torino: Bocca, 1901); Niceforo, Il gergo nei normali, nei degenerati e nei criminali (Torino: Bocca, 1897); Niceforo, La delinquenza in Sardegna (Palermo: Sandron, 1897); Niceforo , L’Italia barbara contemporanea; see Nicola Pende’s critique, targeted at Niceforo , in Bonifica umana razionale e biologia politica (Bologna: Cappelli, 1933), 237.

  37. 37.

    For a specific interpretation of Niceforo’s anti-southernism as the most evident proof of the need for “internal colonialism,” see Dickie, Darkest Italy, 6–11.

  38. 38.

    Joseph Pugliese, “Race as a Category of Crisis. Whiteness and the Topical Assignation of Race,” Social Semiotics, no. 12 (2002): 156.

  39. 39.

    Cesare Lombroso, “Le pigmentazioni e l’erpetismo nelle alienazioni mentali,” Giornale Italiano delle Malattie Veneree e della Pelle, no. 4 (1867): 17–40.

  40. 40.

    For Niceforo as for Lombroso (on this point, see in particular Dickie, Stereotypes of the Italian South, 117–9), the belief in the South’s general historical and genetic inferiority did not exclude a nationalistic point of view; rather, it served to legitimise the North’s colonial intervention in the South. On this issue, see Dickie, Darkest Italy, 2–7.

  41. 41.

    For an analysis of the juxtaposition of “cleanness,” “whitening,” and “racial improvement” since the immediate aftermath of World War II, see Cristina Lombardi-Diop, “L’Italia cambia pelle. La bianchezza degli italiani dal Fascismo al boom economico,” in Bianco e nero. Storia dell’identità razziale degli italiani, Gaia Giuliani and Cristina Lombardi-Diop (Firenze and Milano: Le Monnier/Mondadori Education, 2013), 67–116.

  42. 42.

    But also, Canada, Australia, and Northern Europe: This flow involved approximately 14 million migrants between 1876 and 1915. Beginning in the 1890s, many emigrated from the southern regions. See Gabaccia , Italy’s Many Diasporas, 68–70.

  43. 43.

    Despite many opponents within both the historical right and left, emigration was favoured by a large number of politicians and scientists until the 1880s, and a majority in the 1890s. While in the 1860s, 1870s, and 1880s the circulars on migration (Menabrea in 1863, Lanza in 1873, and Depretis in 1883) privileged administrative channels over legislative ones, considering it mainly a matter of public order, in 1888, Crispi’s government approved a pro-migration law (no. 5866 of 30 January) with clear “expansionist” aims, allowing unrestrained emigration. See Matteo Sanfilippo, “Chiesa, ordini religiosi e migrazione,” in Bevilacqua et al., Storia dell’emigrazione italiana. Arrivi, 127–42; Gabaccia , Italy’s Many Diasporas, 136–41; on the “expansionist” aims of laws on emigration from 1988, 1901, and 1906, see Guido Tintori, “Cittadinanza e politiche dell’emigrazione nell’Italia liberale e fascista. Un approfondimento storico,” in Familismo legale. Come (non) diventare italiani, ed. Giovanna Zincone (Roma and Bari: Laterza, 2006), 52–106.

  44. 44.

    Lombroso , In Calabria, 87. My translation.

  45. 45.

    Francesca di Pasquale, “La colonizzazione penitenziaria nella costruzione nazionale,” 161–2.

  46. 46.

    One of the issues under discussion was Il problema dell’emigrazione nei suoi rapporti con l’Africa italiana (The issue of emigration in the context of Italy’s relationship with Africa). See Virginia Amorosi, “Il lavoro come problema giuridico di ordine internazionale. Spunti dalle colonie d’Africa di primo Novecento,” in Ruocco and Bascherini, Vicino lontano, 146–7.

  47. 47.

    Nicola Labanca, “La storiografia italiana sulle istituzioni coloniali,” in Oltremare. Diritto e istituzioni dal colonialismo all’età postcoloniale, ed. Aldo Mazzacane (Napoli: Cuen, 2006), 214.

  48. 48.

    As of June 1927, and after replacing the General Commissariat on Emigration with the General Department of Italians Abroad, authorities sent a series of circulars to prefects and set more stringent requirements for granting passports with the aim of curbing emigration. The words emigrant/emigration were banned in political and legal language, and replaced by “Italian workers abroad.” See Ipsen , Dictating Demography, 60ff.

  49. 49.

    On this point, in addition to Alberto M. Banti’s work, see also Luigi Goglia and Fabio Grassi, Il colonialismo italiano da Adua all’impero (Roma and Bari: Laterza, 1981), 3–33.

  50. 50.

    See Nicola Labanca, Oltremare. Storia dell’espansione coloniale italiana (Bologna: il Mulino, 2007), 390–411 and Labanca, In marcia verso Adua (Torino: Einaudi, 1993), 150–8.

  51. 51.

    Gabriele Proglio, Libia 1911–1912. Immaginari coloniali e italianità (Firenze and Milano: Le Monnier/Mondadori Education, 2016), 52–64.

  52. 52.

    Enzo Santarelli, Giorgio Rochat, Luigi Goglia, and Romain Rainero, Omar al-Mukhtar e la riconquista fascista della Libia (Milano: Marzoratti, 1981); Angelo del Boca, Gli italiani in Libia (Roma and Bari: Laterza, 1986–1988); Nicola Labanca, La guerra italiana per la Libia (1911–1931) (Bologna: il Mulino, 2013); Gustavo Ottolenghi, Gli italiani e il colonialismo. I campi di detenzione italiani in Africa (Milano: Sugarco, 1997).

  53. 53.

    Labanca , La guerra italiana per la Libia, 37; Proglio , Libia 1911–1912.

  54. 54.

    See Nani, Ai confini della nazione, 46; Labanca , Oltremare, 472, 477. About the intrinsic goodness of Italian civilisation see also Laura Ricci, La lingua dell’impero. Comunicazione, letteratura e propaganda nell’età del colonialismo italiano (Roma: Carocci, 2005), 13.

  55. 55.

    Nani, Ai confini della nazione, 46–51.

  56. 56.

    Gabrielli , Il curriculo “razziale”. La costruzione dell’alterità di “razza” e coloniale nella scuola italiana (1860–1950) (Macerata: EUM, 2015), 58–62.

  57. 57.

    Guido Abbattista, “Torino 1884: Africani in mostra,” Contemporanea 7, no. 3 (2004): 369–409.

  58. 58.

    This transnational racist attitude and culture is nonetheless acknowledged by Abbattista in Umanità in mostra, 57–102. The term “expository chronotope” was coined by Abbattista, see p. 97.

  59. 59.

    Abbattista , Umanità in mostra, 154; Mirzoeff , The Right to Look.

  60. 60.

    Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996).

  61. 61.

    As scholars have outlined, in the plot’s first draft by the archaeologist Auguste Mariette, Aida had been originally imagined as white. Serena Guarracino and Maria Elena Paniconi have argued that given the rigid racial opposition between the Ethiopian slaves (black) and the ancient Egyptian masters (white), princess Aida can only be loved because she is white (her noble origins whiten her up). Or, if we reverse the perspective along bell hooks’ analysis, it is the whitening effect of the white man’s love that transforms Aida into an as-white-as-an-Egyptian-can-be object of desire. To be loved by the prince she must be(come) white: an intersectional construction of the cannibalised colonial subaltern that would linger on and go on to populate much of Italy’s post-fascist and postcolonial (late 1970s) television imaginary and the transnational construction of today’s black female beauties with-a-whiter-complexion for a white audience and market. Serena Guarracino, “Verdi’s Aida across the Mediterranean (and beyond),” California Italian Studies Journal 1, no. 1 (2010): 1–17; and Maria Elena Paniconi, “Politiche della razza all’opera,” in “La ‘realtà’ transnazionale della razza. Dinamiche di razzializzazione in prospettiva comparata,” ed. Tatiana Petrovich Njegosh, special issue, Iperstoria, no. 6 (2015): 94–113. See also Christopher Gauthier and Jennifer McFarlane, “Nationalism, Racial Difference, and ‘Egyptian’ Meaning in Verdi’s Aida,” in Blackness in Opera, ed. Naomi Andre, Karen M. Bryan, and Eric Saylor (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2012), 57–77.

  62. 62.

    Palma , “Mirror with a memory?”

  63. 63.

    Silvana Palma, L’Italia coloniale (Roma: Editori Riuniti, 1999), 14.

  64. 64.

    Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Rosetta Books), 2.

  65. 65.

    Sontag , On Photography, 32.

  66. 66.

    On school textbooks, see Gabrielli , Il curriculo “razziale,” 17. Gianluca Bascherini, “Colonizzazione e studio storico del diritto costituzionale,” in Ruocco and Bascherini, Vicino lontano, 21–34. On the low profits generated by Italian colonisation in the Horn of Africa, Sudan, and Libya, see Labanca , Oltremare, 269–307.

  67. 67.

    Olindo de Napoli, “Colonialismo e diritto pubblico,” in Ruocco and Bascherini, Vicino lontano, 65–82.

  68. 68.

    Giovan Battista Penne, Per l’Italia Africana (Roma: E. Voghera, 1906).

  69. 69.

    Alfredo Oriani, Fino a Dogali (Bologna: Cappelli, 1923), 298.

  70. 70.

    Oriani , Fino a Dogali, 302.

  71. 71.

    Proglio , Libia 1911–1912, 71–139.

  72. 72.

    Proglio, Libia 1911–1912, 223–305.

  73. 73.

    Massimo Zaccaria, Anch’io per la tua bandiera. Il V battaglione ascari in missione sul fronte libico (1912) (Ravenna: Giorgio Pozzi, 2012).

  74. 74.

    On the sanctification of the figures of the unknown soldiers and mater dolorosa, see Proglio , Libia 1911–1912, 153; and Banti , Sublime madre nostra: La nazione italiana dal Risorgimento al fascismo (Roma and Bari: Laterza, 2011), 51–93. For a reflection on opera, Italian cities, and the Risorgimento, see Axel Körner, Politics of Culture in Liberal Italy From Unification to Fascism (New York: Routledge, 2009); for a reflection on opera and the politicisation of the public sphere in the mid-1800s in Europe, see Carlotta Sorba, Il melodramma della nazione. Politica e sentimenti nell’età del Risorgimento (Roma and Bari: Laterza, 2015). See also Raffaella Bianchi and Bezen Balamir Coskun, “Opera Across Borders: The Construction of Italian and Turkish National Identities,” Anglistica 13, no. 2 (2009): 59–70.

  75. 75.

    Francesco Di Chiara, Peplum . Il cinema italiano alle prese col mondo antico (Roma: Donzelli, 2016), 103.

  76. 76.

    On the figure of Maciste as regards the Italo-Turkish war, World War I, Mussolini’s public persona, and the gendered racialised imaginary of the “brawny masculinity,” see D’Amelio’s works; Jaqueline Reich, The Maciste Films of Italian Silent Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010); Monica Dall’Asta, Un cinéma musclé. Le superhomme dans le cinéma muet italian (1913–1926) (Crisnée: Yellow Now, 1992), 40–46; Daniel O’Brien, Classical Masculinity and the Spectacular Body on Film: The Mighty Sons of Hercules (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014); and Richard Dyer’s classic “The White Man’s Muscles,” in White (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), 145–83.

  77. 77.

    These divisions remained evident in colonial Libya. See Barbara Spadaro, Una colonia italiana. Rappresentazioni tra Italia e Libia (1910–1940) (Firenze and Milano: Le Monnier/Mondadori Education, 2012).

  78. 78.

    See Wong, Race and the Nation, 94–6; Nani, Ai confini della nazione, 60, 97–115; Ricci, La lingua dell’impero, 57–8, 84–9.

  79. 79.

    Oriani , Fino a Dogali, 296.

  80. 80.

    In general, Italianness was coextensive with whiteness but in non-explicit terms. As Nani has noted, the press of the time used the word “race” with various meanings (p. 61).

  81. 81.

    This is particularly clear in the case of the Eritrean Askaris of the V-Battalion. Although Italy prized their military commitment and loyalty during the Italian occupation of Libya, the suggestion that they should be granted full Italian citizenship was readily dismissed because of their racial difference. See Zaccaria, Anch’io per la tua bandiera, 8–18, 137–41.

  82. 82.

    Oriani , Fino a Dogali, 269.

  83. 83.

    Giovanni Bovio used this expression in a speech to the legislative chamber on March 17, 1885; Bovio, Il diritto pubblico e le razze umane, in Romain Rainero, L’anticolonialismo italiano da Massaua a Assab (1869–1896) (Milano: Edizioni di Comunità, 1971), 96.

  84. 84.

    See, for instance, the debate between the so-called Mediterraneanists and Aryanists. See Claudia Mantovani, Rigenerare la società. L’eugenetica in Italia dalle origini ottocentesche agli anni Trenta (Soveria Mannelli: Rubbettino, 2004).

  85. 85.

    See Nelson Moe, The View from Vesuvius: Italian Culture and the Southern Question (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002); Dickie, Darkest Italy, 18; and Patriarca , Italian Vices, 7, 14.

  86. 86.

    Goglia and Grassi, Il colonialismo italiano, 10.

  87. 87.

    Chiara Giorgi, L’Africa come carriera. Funzioni e funzionari del colonialismo italiano (Roma: Carocci, 2012), 30.

  88. 88.

    Banti , Sublime madre nostra.

  89. 89.

    L’Osservatore cattolico, March 22, 1899.

  90. 90.

    The use of the term race in this period was closely related to a Spenglerian-type nationalist and populationist vision, in which the nationalist need for demographic growth was accompanied by concerns about a decrease in births and the power of the Western white race. See Ipsen , Dictating Demography, 60. Mussolini later referenced these tropes, formalising them in his speech “La razza bianca muore?” September 4, 1934, in Scritti e discorsi (Milano: Hoepli, 1934–1938), vol. 9.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Centro de Estudos Sociais, University of Coimbra, Coimbra, Portugal

    Gaia Giuliani

Authors
  1. Gaia Giuliani
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Copyright information

© 2019 The Author(s)

About this chapter

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this chapter

Giuliani, G. (2019). Race, Gender, and the Early Colonial Imaginary. In: Race, Nation and Gender in Modern Italy. Mapping Global Racisms. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-50917-8_2

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-50917-8_2

  • Published:

  • Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London

  • Print ISBN: 978-1-137-50915-4

  • Online ISBN: 978-1-137-50917-8

  • eBook Packages: Social SciencesSocial Sciences (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics

Search

Navigation