Shooting the Colonial Past in Contemporary Italian Cinema

Abstract

The presence of migrants in Italy since the late 1980s has been commonly seen as a key factor in prompting some kind of revival of interest in the nation’s own colonial past, an aspect of the country’s history that had largely been placed under erasure. Although Italy’s colonial project predated Fascism, it is indelibly associated with the invasion of Ethiopia in 1935 and Mussolini’s subsequent declaration of Empire. The loss of its colonial possessions after World War II meant that Italy never had to engage in a protracted period of decolonization. While it may seem inevitable that the national memory of colonialism was weaker in Italy than in other Western European countries with more ample colonial histories, this inevitability is at odds with events such as the controversy around the return of the stele to Axum in the late 1990s, which indicated that Italy’s colonial past had not been forgotten at all but rather occupied a place in the national consciousness that was too painful or murky to visit (Triulzi). Yet since then, the recollection of the colonial past has featured more insistently in a range of cultural forms suggesting that Italy is perhaps now ready to begin reflecting on that past. Gabriella Ghermandi’s novel Regina di fiori e di perle (2007) builds on earlier work by Erminia Dell’Oro such as L’abbandono (1991) to recall and reinterpret Italy’s presence in East Africa from the perspective of the colonized. Popular detective fiction has also begun to make use of the empire as a location.