Derek Duncan

Italy's Postcolonial Cinema and its Histories of Representation

Abstract A number of recent films have explored migration to Italy. Responses tend to focus on the novelty of this phenomenon in relation to Italian history, and to the history of Italian cinema as a nation building project. I argue, however, that these films need to be seen in terms of how they racialize the non-Italian subject, and that they are embedded in complex histories of Italian colonialism, and emigration. After surveying work on Italian cinema that engages with questions of race, I consider the representation of Albanian migrants in Munzis Saimir (2004). Despite the films sympathetic take on the efforts of clandestine, Albanian migrants to integrate into Italian society, it is mired in a tradition of representation that systematically constructs the non-Italian as extraneous to the nation. Saimir can be seen as a postcolonial film as its representational economy depends on, and extends, a colonial logic of racial difference.

Translanguaging: Claudio Giovannesi’s postcolonial practices

Abstract Claudio Giovannesi’s Fratelli d’Italia (2009) is a documentary about the lives of three teenagers of non-Italian origins living in the Roman periphery. The third episode of the film features Nader, a second generation Italian–Egyptian and his conflicts both at school and in his family. Nader Sarhan starred in Giovannesi’s later Alì ha gli occhi azzurri (2012), a feature film whose plot was loosely inspired by the life in Ostia of his younger self. Giovannesi blurs the line between documentary and fiction by casting Nader as ‘himself’ (members of his family also appear in both films). This blurring can be seen as one example of ‘translanguaging’, a way of moving across linguistic and cultural systems which suggests their permeability. Practices of translanguaging allow a movement across the familiar binary logic of the bi-national, pointing to quotidian practices of cultural difference with no clear culture of origin nor host. Nader’s family’s move between Arabic and Italian as they constantly re-negotiate their cultural values. Giovannesi reworks the familiar defining link between territory and language, yet the films offer no celebratory account of multilingual and multi-ethnic Europe.

Shooting the Colonial Past in Contemporary Italian Cinema

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.