In this exploratory project, thanks to the Venture Grant funds, the Keller Family, Anthropology Department at Colorado College and individuals who contributed to this project, I decided to focus on the black Italian identity and how the end of colonialism - and failed decolonization - produced and continues to create structurally violent systems for diasporic black individuals, through policy, legislation, and socio-cultural (racist) ideas of what Italianness looks like (ius sanguinins, anti-black/anti-migration politics). And how these, in turn, affect psycho-affective black status. I started exploring how the impacts of Italian colonialism - fed by fascism and its subsequent rhetoric - constructed a national identity marked by normative whiteness that perpetually excludes black diasporic individuals and modern-day migrants, ultimately impacting their psycho-social, emotional and physical health. 

Milan, on my way to my participant observation in one of the spaces that work towards deconstructing and re-constructing material colonial legacies

Sid Negash not only talked about the liminal, ambiguous status - culturally and socially - of second-generation migrants and black diasporic individuals, but he also touched on the legal, juridical and political status of those “not recognized as Italians”, despite having lived all life in the country.

During my interviews, talks, and walk-through at Approdi, the concept of duality - the feeling of in-between - often came up. Training as an anthropologist during my career at Colorado College, I tried to theorize the experiences - as recalled both by individuals and expert knowledge - in a framework that would be useful to contextualize and expand the scholarship in the field of Italian Migration and Colonial Studies: Liminality and Post-Colonial Pathology.

Resistenze in Cirenaica has been working in the Cyrenaica neighborhood, named so in the past due to the high presence of colonial roads. In the aftermath of the second world war, the city council decided unanimously to rename the roads carrying fascist and colonial street signs (except for via Libya, left as a memorial marker) with partisans’ names, honoring the city at the center of the resistance movement during the fascist and Nazi occupation. Since 2015, the collective has made this place the center of an ongoing laboratory including urban walks, readings, and storytelling aiming to “deprovincialize resistances”, considering the battles in the ex-colonies as well as in Europe, against the nazi-fascist forces, as antiracist struggles. The publishing of Quaderni di Cirene (Cyrene’s notebooks, which I was given as a gift after my visits) brought together local and overseas stories of people who resisted fascist and colonial occupation, with the fourth book addressing the lives of fighter and partisan women through a gender lens.

Labanca, Nicola. 2006. "Constructing Mussolini's New Man in Africa? Italian Memories of the Fascist War on Ethiopia." Italian Studies61(2):225-232  https://coloradocollege.idm.oclc.org/login?url=https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=mzh&AN=2006462242&site=eds-live .

Rand, Lucy. 2020. "Transgenerational Shame in Postcolonial Italy: Igiaba Scego’s Adua." Journal of Postcolonial Writing 56(1):4-17  https://coloradocollege.idm.oclc.org/login?url=https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=mzh&AN=202017026211&site=eds-live   http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17449855.2019.1675085 .

Milan, on my way to my participant observation in one of the spaces that work towards deconstructing and re-constructing material colonial legacies