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ABSTRACT
This article considers the life and work of Afrodescendant Italian artists Iris Peynado, Nadia Kibout and Nadia Ali. Through my interviews with them and a critical analysis of their films, I underline the cultural value of their achievements and emphasize the discriminations that black women face in contemporary society and in the cinema industry. Racial, class and gender biases often are subjects of their filmmaking, and offer a critical site to reflect on the need for further social and political change. Their collective experience is seen in light of a transnational spatial and temporal continuity between black Italians and the diasporic communities around the world. A variety of nuanced cultural expressions makes it inaccurate to consider Italian Afrodescendant artists as a monolithic group of women having a single identity. In spite of societal biases, they are powerfully emerging as filmmakers, actresses, and activists. They contribute to our understanding that a true postcolonial approach requires a more fluid and flexible consideration of Italian identity as a transnational and multi-faceted expression of a fertile intersection of people of diverse genders, races, and religions.
SOMMARIO
Questo articolo prende in considerazione la vita e il lavoro delle artiste italiane afrodiscendenti tra cui Iris Peynado, Nadia Kibout e Nadia Ali. Attraverso le mie interviste con loro e un'analisi critica dei loro film, sottolineo il valore culturale del loro lavoro ed evidenzio le discriminazioni che le donne afro-discendenti devono affrontare nella società contemporanea e nell'industria cinematografica. I pregiudizi razziali, di genere e di classe sono spesso oggetto dei loro film e offrono uno spazio critico per riflettere sulla necessità di ulteriori cambiamenti sociali e politici. La loro esperienza collettiva è vista alla luce di una continuità spaziale e temporale transnazionale tra gli italiani neri e le comunità diasporiche di tutto il mondo. La varietà delle loro espressioni culturali rende impreciso considerarle un gruppo monolitico di donne aventi un'unica identità. Nonostante i pregiudizi sociali, queste donne afro-discendenti stanno emergendo con forza come cineaste, attrici e attiviste, contribuendo a farci comprendere che un vero approccio postcoloniale richiede una considerazione più fluida e flessibile dell'identità italiana, che è dunque da ritenersi un'espressione transnazionale di una fertile intersezione di persone di diversi generi, razze e religioni.
‘Those of us who are always anti-racist long for a world in which everyone can form a beloved community where borders can be crossed and cultural hybridity celebrated.’ (Emphases are original; p. 272)
bell hooks, Killing Rage: Ending Racism
Acknowledgements
I would like to extent my heartfelt thanks to Iris Peynado, Nadia Kibout and Nadia Ali for meeting with me and sharing their private journey as Afro-descendant women in Italy as well as their professional struggles and remarkable achievements.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 For more on the Italian colonial past and its influence on Italian society today, see, among the many postcolonial studies, Italian Mobilities, ed. by Ruth Ben-Ghiat and Stephanie Malia Hom (London: Routledge, 2016); Postcolonial Transitions in Europe: Contexts, Practices and Politics, ed. by S. Ponzanesi and G. Colpani (London, England: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016); S. Ponzanesi, ‘Edges of Empire: Italy's Postcolonial Entanglements and the Gender Legacy’, Cultural Studies, 14.4 (2016), pp. 373–86.; Cristina Lombardi-Diop and Caterina Romeo, Postcolonial Italy: Challenging National Homogeneity (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012); National Belongings: Hybridity in Italian Colonial and Postcolonial Cultures, ed. by Jacqueline Andall and Derek Duncan (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2010); S. Mezzadra, La condizione postcoloniale: Storia e politica nel presente globale (Verona, Italy: Ombre Corte, 2008); M. Mellino, ‘Italy and Postcolonial Studies: A Difficult Encounter’, Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, 8 (2006), pp. 461–71; M. Mellino, La critica postcoloniale (Rome: Meltemi, 2005); Graziella Parati, Migration Italy: The Art of Talking Back in a Destination Culture (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005); Italian Colonialism, ed. by Ruth Ben Ghiat and Mia Fuller (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).
In regard to migrations and the concept of transnationality pertaining to the study of Italian culture and identity, see Pasquale Verdicchio, Bound by Distance: Rethinking Nationalism through the Italian Diasporas (Madison, NJ: Farleigh-Dickinson Press, 1997); Donna R. Gabaccia, Italy's Many Diasporas (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2000); Italian Workers of the World: Labor Migration and the Formation of Multiethnic States, ed. by Donna R. Gabaccia and Fraser M. Ottanelli (Urbana: University of Illinois, 2005); Women, Gender, and Transnational Lives: Italian Workers of the World, ed. by Donna R. Gabaccia and Franca Iacovetta (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002); Transnational Italian Studies, ed. by Charles Burdett and Loredana Polezzi (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2020); Transnational Modern Languages, ed. by Jennifer Burns and Derek Duncan (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2022).
2 See L. Balbo and L. Manconi, I razzismi reali (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1992); L. Einaudi, Immigration Policies in Italy from Unification to Today (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 2007), p. 141.
3 Heather Merrill, Black Spaces: African Diaspora in Italy (New York: Routledge, 2018), p. 1, observes that ‘the relationship between Europe and Africa is long and profoundly intertwined, with both continents acting as fundamental participants in the making of the Modern West’.
4 S. A. Smythe, ‘Black Italianità: Citizenship and Belonging in the Black Mediterranean’ in ‘Italia senza Frontiere/Borderless Italy’, ed. by C. Fogu, Stephanie Malia Hom, and Laura E. Ruberto, Special Issue of California Italian Studies, 9.1 (2019), <https://doi.org/10.5070/C391042328>, p. 19.
See also the introduction to the special issue: Claudia Fogu, Stephanie Malia Hom, and Laura E. Ruberto, ‘Introduction to Volume 9, Issue 1: Italia senza frontiere/Borderless Italy’, in ‘Italia senza Frontiere/Borderless Italy’, ed. by Fogu, Hom, and Ruberto, https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3nm019xg, p. 5. These scholars mention the past Mediterranean as a sea of fears because of the banditry and the kidnappings of those who lived along its vulnerable coasts, and a sea of shipwrecks and death today due to the numerous migrants who cross it in makeshift boats heading towards the Italian coasts.
5 G. G. Sergi, The Mediterranean Race: A Study of the Origin of European Peoples [Origine e diffusione della stirpe mediterranea] (London: Walter Scott, 1901, originally published in 1895).
6 See also Ponzanesi, ‘Edges of Empire’. Ponzanesi observes that Italian exceptionalism refers to ‘the idea that Italian colonialism was limited in scope and scale and therefore more benign and less pernicious in its contemporary legacies. It is exactly this prolonged denial and silencing of the colonial impact and responsibilities that explains Italy’s late arrival and late acceptance of the postcolonial framework within Italian studies. This has led, as a consequence, to the ‘unchallenged’ reproduction of the racist and gendered stereotypes along colonial lines’, p. 375. To understand the underestimation of Italian colonialism and its effects in Africa, see also Cristina Lombardi-Diop and Caterina Romeo, ‘Paradigms of Postcoloniality in Contemporary Italy’ in Lombardi-Diop and Romeo, Postcolonial Italy, pp. 1–29.
7 Lombardi-Diop and Romeo, ‘Paradigms of Postcoloniality in Contemporary Italy’, p. 2.
8 Ibid., p. 3. See also Ella Shoat, ‘Notes on the Post-Colonial’, Social Text, 31/32 (1992), pp. 99–113; Ania Loomba, Colonialism/Postcolonialism (New York: Routledge, 1998); Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Context (New York and London: Routledge, 1995).
9 Lombardi-Diop and Romeo, in ‘Paradigms of Postcoloniality in Contemporary Italy’, p. 3, underline how ‘the fact that emigration became a mass phenomenon in Italy (1870s), soon after the Unification (1861–70), and that a decade later Italy started acquiring coastal territories on the Red Sea (1882), soon to become the first Italian formal colony in Eritrea (1890), underlines the transnational nature of the newly unified nation-state, a state that found a sense of national identity and culture while projecting itself far beyond its territorial borders [ … .] In turn, emigration has de-centred the sense of national belonging and disseminated linguistic and cultural features inherent to the concept of italianità, a concept that is now crucial to a definition and an understanding of the postcolonial condition in contemporary Italy.’
10 Ponzanesi, ‘Edges of the Empire’, p. 376.
11 Annalisa Frisina and Camilla Hawthorne, ‘Italians with Veils and Afros: Gender, Beauty, and the Everyday Anti-racism of the Daughters of Immigrants in Italy’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 44.5 (2018), 718–735, at p. 720. The emphasis in italics is mine.
12 Annamaria Rivera, ‘Preface: For a Non-Hegemonic Study on Diasporas in Italian Cinema’, L'Africa in Italia: Per una controstoria postcoloniale del cinema italiano, ed. by Leonardo De Franceschi (Rome: Arachne, 2013), p. 20. Translation mine.
13 Ibid., p. 21. Rivera also maintains that ‘In order to outline a counter history of the absence-presence of others in Italian cinema, one is forced to establish who they are, to define them, to confine them in a category, albeit methodological and provisional, trying to avoid biologism and essentialism. In reality, if a tradition, although minority, of transcultural (or cross-cultural) cinematography had been consolidated, such as to make the references to the origin or to the “color” of the protagonists inappropriate, incongruous, and improper, there would be no need for this category, which instead had to be used here to put it at the service of the principle of affirmative action’ Emphases are original; (p. 21). Translation mine. On this issue see also R. Gallissot, M. Kilani, and A. Rivera, L’imbrogio etnico in quattordici parole-chiavi (Dedalo: Bari, 2012).
14 L'Africa in Italia, ed. by De Franceschi, p. 41.
15 In this article I only briefly mention the first Italian Afrodescendant women active in cinema and television, since extensive studies have already been carried out by scholars such as Leonardo De Franceschi, Maria Coletti, Rosetta Giuliani Caponetto, Sandra Ponzanesi, Ruth Ben Ghiat, Camilla Hawthorne, Annalisa Frisina, Aine O'Healy, David Forgacs, Derek Duncan, and several others whom I will refer to in scattered citations.
16 Rivera, p. 22. Emphases are original.
17 Regarding the work of the other artists mentioned above and the interviews recently conducted with them, I defer a further analysis to my forthcoming essays.
18 Merrill, p. 5.
19 For a detailed survey of the participation of Afro-descendant actors in Italian productions, see Leonardo Di Franceschi, ‘Cantiere aperto ai non addetti ai lavori: Note a mo’ di introduzione’, in L'Africa in Italia, ed. by Di Franceschi, pp. 25–64, especially pp. 45–56; M. Coletti, ‘Benvenute in Italia: Donne migranti e G2 in cerca d’autore’, in Quaderni del CSCL, 8 (2012), pp. 108–13; A O’Healy, ‘Border Traffic: Reimagining the Voyage to Italy’, in Transnational Feminism in Film and Media, ed. by K. Marciniak, A. Imre, and A. O’Healy (New York: Palgrave, 2007), pp. 145–99; A. O’Healy, ‘Mediterranean Passages Abjection and Belonging in Contemporary Italian Cinema’ California Italian Studies, 1.a.1 (2010), pp. 1–19; A. O’Healy, ‘“Non è una somala”: Deconstructing African Femininity in Italian Film’, The Italianist, 29.2, pp. 175–98.
20 Among the Afrodescendant actresses active in the 1940s and 1950s were also Pamela Winters and Samia Gamal.
21 The same song ‘Faccetta nera’ (‘Black Little Face’) addresses a black woman, a brunette, a beautiful Abyssinian, ‘slave among the slaves’ that presumably the Italians would have freed with the conquest of her land, giving her ‘another law and another King’ and bringing her to Rome, ‘liberated’ to wear the black shirt and parade in front of the Duce.
22 See Giuliani Caponetto, ‘Zeudi Araya, Ines Pellegrini e il cinema italiano di seduzione coloniale’, in L’Africa in Italia, ed. by De Franceschi, pp. 109–25; Sandra Ponzanesi, ‘Beyond the Black Venus: Colonial Sexual Politics and Contemporary Visual Practices’, in Italian Coloniation Legacies and Memories, ed. by Jacqueline Andall and Derek Duncan (Bern: Peter Lang, 2005), pp. 165–89; S. Sabelli, ‘L'eredità del colonialismo nelle rappresentazioni contemporanee del corpo femminile nero', in « Zapruder. Storie in movimento», Brava gente. Memoria e rappresentazione del colonialismo ed. by Elena Petricola e Andrea Tappi, 23 (September–December 2010), pp. 106–15.
23 Caponetto, p. 117. Translation mine.
24 At the end of the 1970s, Pellegrini worked in films such as Scandalo in famiglia (1976) by Marcello Andrei, Comincerà tutto un mattino: io donna tu donna (1978) by Angelo Pannacciò, and La bella governante di colore (1978) by Luigi Russo.
25 Caponetto, p. 120. Translation mine.
26 Iris Peynado acted in films such as Attila flagello di Dio by Castellano and Pipolo (1982), State buoni se potete by Luigi Magni (1983), and Non ci resta che piangere (1984) by Massimo Troisi and Roberto Benigni, and for television in films such as Baciami Strega by Duccio Tessari (1985) and Cristoforo Colombo by Alberto Lattuada (1985). In the early years of the new millennium, Iris Peynado starred in Elisa di Riva Ombrosa (TV series, episodes 1–4, 2003) by Cinzia T. H. Torrini, Un posto al sole (TV series) by Stefano Amatucci (2005), Don Matteo (TV series, episode ‘Il ballo delle debutante’) by Elisabetta Marchetti (2007), The Captain (TV series, two episodes, 2007) by Vittorio Sindoni, and starring as Marisa in a film for the cinema, Lontano lontano (2019) by Gianni De Gregorio.
27 In an interview conducted with the actress (Anna Paparcone, Interview with Iris Peynado, Lewisburg, 16 February 2023, conducted via Zoom), Peynado points out that after the great successful films that made her famous in the 1980s, she moved to Los Angeles for a few years where she continued to study acting and refine her knowledge and skills as an actress. Upon her return to Italy in the 1990s, she expected to use what she learned, but this did not happen. ‘There were no serious opportunities, just illusions, minimal roles.’
28 From Paparcone, Interview with Iris Peynado, ibid.
29 Ibid.
30 Tezeta Abrahams in an interview in Fred Kuwornu’s documentary Blaxploitalian (2016).
31 Additional research on Afrodescendant artists in Italy in the 1980s as well as a deeper analysis of Peynado’s films are needed to further demonstrate the strong throughline between Pellegrini, Peynado, and contemporary artists of African descent.
32 Nadia Kibout, Muima, story shared privately and awaiting publication. Kibout’s experience was devastating and it reminds us of the one described by Sibilla Aleramo at the beginning of the century in her autobiographical novel Una donna, which speaks of a patriarchal system in which a woman is submissive to her father and then to her husband, and deprived of the freedom of achieving her dreams. The protagonist, reflecting on her mother, wonders: ‘Poor, poor soul! Beauty, goodness, intelligence had not served her. Life had asked for strength: she had none. To love and sacrifice and succumb! This is her destiny and perhaps of all women?’ Sibilla Aleramo, Una Donna (Milan: Feltrinelli, 2004), p. 41. The first edition of the book dates back to 1950. Translation mine.
33 Kibout, Muima. Translation mine.
34 Ibid.
35 For a complete list and descriptions of Kibout's films, see Nadia Kibout on IMDb, https://www.imdb.com/name/nm2158703/. Her latest short film, “L'Ultimo Traghetto” (2023) in which Nadia Kibout is the protagonist Fatima, has been recently awarded the “Gran Premio” at the 77th Salerno International Film Festival.
36 Produced by the Impegno Donna association with the contribution of the Department for Equal Opportunities (Stereotipando Project). <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v-UnMVx6BYNhU>.
37 Anna Paparcone, Conversation with Nadia Kibout, interview conducted online, 23 February 2023.
38 Ibid.
39 It is a melody in A minor capable of expressing, like many compositions in this musical key, sadness and nostalgia. See Patrick O'Toole, Ian Pitt, Donald Glowinski, and Maurizio Mancini, ‘When Emotions Are Triggered by Single Musical Notes: Revealing the Underlying Factors of Auditory-Emotion Associations’, in ICML21 Companion: Companion Publication of the 2021 International Conference on Multimodal Interaction, ed. by Zakia Hammal and Carlos Busso, (October 2021), pp. 291–98. https://doi.org/10.1145/3461615.3485419
40 In the true story, Kibout was the passenger Imma next to the fleeing Arab woman.
41 This is the note F which introduces a melody in F minor, a key often used to communicate a dark and funereal mood. It evokes depression, death, loss, and moral misery.
42 Imma loses the medallion when Nadia stops at her house for a few minutes to then escape from her brother’s violent grip. On her way out, Nadia runs into Imma who is looking for her and who inadvertently drops the medallion which is then picked up by Nadia’s brother.
43 Paparcone, Conversation with Nadia Kibout.
44 Frisina and Hawthorne, p. 723.
45 Paparcone, Conversation with Nadia Kibout.
46 Ibid.
47 See Ingrid Banks, Hair Matters: Beauty, Power, and Black Women’s Consciousness (New York: New York University Press, 2000); Robin Kelly, ‘Nap Time: Historicizing the Afro’, Fashion Theory, 1.4, 339–51; Ayama Bird and Lori L. Tharps, Hair Story: Untangling the Roots of Black Hair in America (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2014).
48 Shirley Tate, Black Beauty, Aesthetics, Stylization Politics (New York: Routledge, 2009), p. 156.
49 See Frisina and Hawthorne, pp. 725–29.
50 Ibid., p. 727.
51 As for her future projects, Kibout is working on two important films: La luna di pietra, the director’s first feature film, and Bucce, another short film. In La luna, Kibout deals with the problem of identity and the state of perennial hardship in which an immigrant is condemned to live. As Kibout specifies in the director’s notes (shared privately), ‘it is an investigation into the human soul, into the search for acceptance by others, into the wounds caused by exclusion’. In Bucce, instead, Kibout returns to the question of the veil, but this time the protagonist, initially a prostitute, has become a nun. The film, which involves the participation of other prominent actresses such as Serra Ylmaz (a strong presence in Ferzan Özpetek's films) in the role of the mother superior and Donatella Finocchiaro in the role of sister Rosa, is especially interesting for the desired resolution in black and white.
52 Nadia Ali is a stage name that Nadia Beddini chose to pay homage to her Arab origins. See Anna Paparcone, Conversation with Nadia Ali, 31 January 2023. Private interview online.
53 Ibid.
54 The questions concern: (1) growing up in Italy; (2) identity; (3) racism; (4) blacks in Italy; (5) immigration; (6) hopes.
55 These are Menelik, Soad, Damien, Marco, Silvia, Eddie, Dabo, Tolu, Abdel Aziz, Tunsi and Emmanuel.
56 Nadia Ali, Black Italians (FireWater — independent production house, 2017). The documentary was written, directed and self-produced by Nadia Ali.
57 In this regard, there is still much to be done. A more careful linguistic study of the intersection between Italian, dialect and English in the use of terms such as ‘nero, negro, nigger, of color’ with negative or neutral connotations reveals a different history of the various black diasporic communities in Italy and in the United States.
58 The interviewee here reports Ali’s thought. Paparcone, Conversation with Nadia Ali.
59 However, this is a hope that clashes with the recent statements of the minister of agriculture, food sovereignty and forests since October 2022, Francesco Lollobrigida, who underlined how the massive presence of Afrodescendant immigrants suggests a so-called ‘ethnic replacement’, a concept used by the Nazis in speaking of racial purity against Jews. See the main titles of various Italian and international news bulletins. The Daily Fact, <https://www.ilfattoquotidiano.it/2023/04/19/lollobrigida-parla-di-sostituzione-etnica-ma-questa-destra-punta-alla-sostituzione-etica7135059>; BBC, <https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-65324319; CCN, https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/19/europe/italy-immigration-lollobrigida-intlindex.html>.
60 Paparcone, Conversation with Nadia Ali.
61 Set in Rome, loosely based on the novel I Never Had My Age by Antonio Dikele Distefano and produced by Fabula Pictures and Red Joint Film, the series was distributed by Netflix — which, however, cancelled it after one season.
62 The refrain of this song is ‘Mr. Officer, stop shooting us down’.
63 The characters they play are also distinct human beings, each with her personal peculiarities and particular needs.
64 This was the case in the formation and development of the Collective N, an association of Afrodescendants formed to carry forward the idea of a more inclusive cinema: <https://www.avanguardiemigranti.it/2018/09/04/il-collettivo-n-foran-inclusive-cinema>. The Collective N formed in 2018, temporarily led by Nadia Kibout, Ira Fronten, and Tezeta Abraham, and has been present at various important events (including the 75th edition of the Venice Film Festival) but, due to internal conflicts, dissolved and its existence today is precarious. However, there are other important associations that I will study in the future. See, for example, Afroltalian Souls, <http://www.afroitaliansouls.it > and Amleta, ‘a social promotion association whose purpose is to contrast gender inequality and violence in the world of entertainment’, <https://www.amleta.org/chi-siamo>, of which Cinzia Span herself is the president.
65 For more information on the work of these artists, see my forthcoming publications.
66 bell hooks, Killing Rage: Ending Racism (New York: Holt Paperback, 1995), p. 16.
67 Ibid., p. 105.
68 Ibid., p. 265.