Political imagination, sexuality and love in the Eurafrican debate

Abstract

This article analyses the connections between political and economic discourses related to the reframing of the European geopolitical space and the growing relevance attached to the sphere of emotions and sexuality in the interwar period. The first part deals with the genealogy of the project of Eurafrica as a geopolitical body, as advanced in 1923 by Richard Coudenhove‐Kalergi. The second part discusses how this discourse circulated during the 1930s and was displaced within debates connected with the Europeanisation of colonies. By looking at the ambivalent and floating borders between sexuality and love, the last part of the article analyses how the stereotype that identifies ‘love’ as a ‘spiritual’ and distinctive feature of Europe was articulated by the colonial imaginary on Euro‐African loves.

Notes

Sforza, Europe and Europeans, p. 245. Carlo Sforza (1872–1952) spent the majority of his lifetime in the diplomatic service. After the war, he took part in the Versailles negotiations as part of the Italian delegation, and in 1921 he became the Minister for Foreign Affairs. With the rise of fascism his career was interrupted. He resumed it in 1943, when he returned to Italy after several years of exile. During these years, he became a supporter of Europeanism; his political engagement was developed in several books such as Makers of Modern Europe, 1930 and Synthèse de l'Europe, 1937. After the Second World War he was elected to the Constituent Assembly and between 1947 and 1950 he signed the Allied Peace Treaty and contributed to Italy's participation in the Marshall Plan, the Council of Europe and NATO.

Ibid., p. 253.

Ibid., p. 212.

Given the politically loaded meaning of the term in this context, I am using the form ‘Eurafrican’ when addressing specifically Richard Coudenhove‐Kalergi's Paneuropean project. I use the form ‘Euro‐African’ in connection with more general questions involving the relations between Europe and Africa.

‘Aucune comparaison ne rend bien compte de la la forme de l'Afrique…. Ce qu'il importe de retenir sourtout, c'est l'épaisseur, la massivité de ses formes, qui contrastent singulièrement avec l'élégance et la sveltesse des formes de l'Europe, la plus découpée des partie du monde', in Le Nouveau Larousse Illustré, 1886–1906, p. 108.

Coudenhove‐Kalergi, Pan‐Europe, pp. 32–4 and the map attached as appendix.

This is particularly evident in the section of Pan‐Europe entitled ‘Europe in the World’ in which Coudenhove‐Kalergi states explicitly the need to apply the tool of ‘science’ to the sphere of politics before moving to repositioning Europe in the World's analysis. See, ibid., pp. 3–21. For his conception of the relationships amongst the geo‐strategic spaces and his debt to the projects by the Austrian pacifist Alfred Hermann Fried (1864–1921) presented in his book Europäische widerherstellung, see Fondation Archives Européennes, Pan‐Europe (1923) et le mouvement paneuropéen. Richard N. de Coudenhove‐Kalergi entre l'Empire d'Austriche‐Hongrie et une Europe gaullienne, p. 9.

Coudenhove‐Kalergi, Pan‐Europe, p. 16.

‘Le moment est venu de donner aux vieux monde cet avertissement: il faut être un nouveau monde. Le moment est venu de fair remarquer a l'Europe, qu'elle a à coté d'elle l'Afrique…. Le moment est venu de dire à ce group illustre de nations “Unissez‐vous, allez au sud!” … Au dix‐neuvième siècle, le blanc a fait du noir un homme; au vingtième siècle, l'Europe fera de l'Afrique un monde. Refaire une Afrique nouvelle, rendre la vielle Afrique maniable à la civilisation, tel est le problème. L'Europe le résoudra', Hugo, Discours sur l'Afrique, pp. 124–8.

Liauzu, Aux origines des tiers‐mondismes: colonisés et anticolonialises en France.

See Heffernan, ‘The Science of Empire: The French Geographical Movement and the Forms of French Imperialism, 1870–1920’, pp. 100–2 and Parker, ‘French geopolitical thought in the interwar years and the emergence of the European idea’, pp. 145–50. For a more detailed discussion of the relationship between the Saint Simonian movement and the Orient see Morsy, Les Saint‐Simoniens et l'Orient. Vers la Modernité.

The proposal was originally presented in Destrée, ‘Pour en finir avec la guerre’. The context in which the plan was conceived was recalled in 1931 in Destrée, ‘L'afrique, colonie européenne'. Jules Destrée (1863–1936) was a lawyer and from 1894 a socialist member of Parliament. After the First World War he joined the Paneuropean Movement and became the vice‐president of the Belgian Pan‐Europe Committee.

Ageron, ‘L'dée d'Eurafrique et le débat colonial franco‐allemande de l'entre‐deux‐guerres', p. 448.

Here I'm thinking in particular of Demangeon, Le déclin de l'Europe, and Decugis, Le destin des races blanches.

Coudenhove‐Kalergi, Pan‐Europe, p. 178.

Coudenhove‐Kalergi, L'Europa s'é desta!, p. 146.

Coudenhove‐Kalergi, Pan‐Europe, p. 17.

Coudenhove‐Kalergi, ‘L'Afrique’. The journal was the official organ of the Pan‐Europe Movement and its first issue was published in Avril 1924 in Vienna. The monthly German edition came out regularly between January 1927 and March 1938, a French edition, from which I am quoting, was published irregularly between 1928 and 1934.

Coudenhove‐Kalergi, L'Europa s'é desta!, p. 94.

Demangeon, Le déclin de l'Europe, p. 70. On the French geographical thought on Europe see Muet, Les géographes et l'Europe. L'idée europeénne dans la pensée géopolitique française de 1919 à 1939.

See Romain Rolland's answer to the two famous questions posed by Coudenhove‐Kalergi: ‘Do you consider a “United States if Europe” a necessity?’ and ‘Do you consider a “United States of Europe” a possibility?’, published with many others in the Paneuropa journal in 1925, p. 39.

Achille Mbembe has discussed the form of domination imposed during the slave trade and later during colonialism in Africa in terms of ‘phallic domination’—not only as ‘a mobilisation of the subjective foundations of masculinity and femininity, but also because it has direct, close connections with the general economy of sexuality…. Male domination derives in large measure from the power and the spectacle of phallus—not so much from the threat to life during war as from the individual male's ability to demonstrate his virility at the expense of a woman and to obtain its validation from the subjugated woman herself’, in Mbembe, On the Postcolony, pp. 13–14.

Coudenhove‐Kalergi, L’Europa s'é desta!, p. 171.

As suggested by Stirk, A History of European Integration since 1914.

Sergi, The Mediterranean Race: A Study of the Origin of the European People. The book brought him international fame and in 1911 he was invited to the First Universal Races Congress held at London University, which, between 26 and 29 July brought together prominent scientists and scholars such as W.E.B. DuBois, Marcus Garvey and the anthropologist Franz Boas. See Sergi, ‘Différance d'habitudes et de moeurs, et leur résistance aux changements rapides’.

Sorgoni, Parole e corpi. Antropologia, discorso giuridico e politiche sessuale interrazziali nella colonia Eritrea (1890–1941), pp. 33–52.

Lorcin, ‘Rome and France in Africa: Recovering Colonial Algeria's Latin Past'.

‘propagandose hasta el Norte, echando los cimientos de las nacionalidades mas antiguas’. Entry ‘Eurafrica’, Enciclopedia Universal Illustrada Europeo Americana, Vol. 22. Madrid‐Barcelona: Espana‐Calpe s.a., 1924, p. 1355.

See Heske, ‘Karl Haushofer: His Role in German Geopolitics and Nazi politics’, p. 137.

Coudenhove‐Kalergi, L'Europa s'é desta!, p. 223. On the following page he added, in a very meaningful way ‘Europe is the white race's elder daughter, in her lies the future of western civilisation, of white humanity'.

The statement is even odder if we pay attention to the fact that he was himself a son of a mixed marriage between an Austrian aristocrat and a Japanese woman.

Coudenhove‐Kalergi, ‘L'Afrique’, p. 10.

‘La possession de l'Afrique pose pour l'Europe la question des races qui lui est épargné ailleurs. Car l'Eurafrique réunit les peuples les plus civilisés de la race blanche et les peuple les plus primitifs de la race noir’, Coudenhove‐Kalergi, ‘Afrique’, p. 13.

Dyer, White, pp. 1–40 .

‘Un Belge est peut‐être mieux à même de réussir. L'exemple de Léopold II l'a prouvé. Mais il faut évidemment qu'il soit de taille’, Destrée, ‘L'afrique, colonie européenne’, pp. 83–5.

Joseph Caillaux conceived of a Europen federation based on economic solidarity and free trade which would include Africa ‘pour soubassement’ in his work Mes Prisons. In the final pages he wrote ‘les États européennes … unis sous la direction morale des Latins avec, pour contrefort, l'empire africain si riche des réalités et d'espérances que la France a eu l'heureuse fortune de constituer, ils pourront vivre, échapper au servage èconomique et financier qui les guette, recouvre la substance de leur grand passée’, p. 347. His thought on Europe was developed later in Où va la France? Où va l'Europe?.

Quoted in Ageron, ‘L'dée d'Eurafrique et le débat colonial franco‐allemande de l'entre‐deux‐guerres', p. 457.

Ibid., pp. 458–9.

Valois, L'Afrique chantier de l'Europe.

‘Le fait colonial est un fait européen [qui] appelle une collaboration européenne à laquelle la France est prête’, in ‘Le discours de P. Reynaud à l'inauguration de l'Exposition’, in Le Temps, 7 May 1931, p. 1 quoted in Deschamps, ‘Quelle Afrique pour une Europe unie?’, p. 111. See also pp. 109–23 for the analyses of the Eurafrican projects flourishing in France around the Paris Colonial Exhibition.

‘La marée montante des peuples de couleur et à l'enterprise bolchevique’, in A. Serraut, Grandeur et servitude colonial quoted in Ageron, ‘L'dée d'Eurafrique et le débat colonial francoallemande de l'entre‐deux‐guerres’, p. 462.

Dawson, ‘Interracial Cooperation as a Factor in European Culture’, p. 103.

Francesco Orestano's speech following Christopher Dawson's lecture is published in Accademia Reale d'Italia, Fondazione Alessandro Volta. Convegno di Scienze morali e storiche, 14–20 novembre 1932, tema: L'Europa, pp. 103–4. The distinction he made between ‘proximate’ and ‘distinct’ races has its roots in the debate about races, species and types that had already taken place in the nineteenth century. Robert J.C. Young has demonstrated how ‘culture’ and ‘race’ have always been imbricated with each other, but have been politically mobilised in order to differentiate between the hybrids of remote species and the offspring of those naturally affiliated and that found widespread acceptance. See Young, Colonial Desire. Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race.

Olivier, ‘L'Europe et le problème colonial’, pp. 469–77.

Orsini di Camerota, ‘Uno sguardo all'Africa. Paesi latini e politica coloniale’, pp. 323–7.

Coudenhove‐Kalergi, Una vita per l'Europa, pp. 212–32. According to his autobiography Asvero Gravelli was present at the Fourth Paneuropean Congress held in Vienna between 16 and 19 May, as the chief in charge of the Italian delegation, p. 217. This would also in part explain why in 1936 Coudenhove‐Kalergi was still hoping to get an audience with Mussolini. See the correspondence with Italian diplomats, ‘Historical Archives of the European Communities’ (European Institute, Florence, Italy) International Paneuropean Movement, National Sections and Committees, file Pan/EU9.

On Asvero Gravelli see Ledeen, L'internazionale fascista, pp. 109–15 and Griffin, Europe for the Europeans: Fascist Myths of the New Order 1922–1992, pp. 12–16.

Orsini di Camerota, ‘Uno sguardo all'Africa. Paneuropa e Africa. Risposta al Conte Coudenhove‐Kalergi’, pp. 625–9.

Guernier, L'Afrique: champ d'expansion de l'Europe.

See Atkinson, ‘Geopolitics, Cartography and Geographical Knowledge: Envisioning Africa from Fascist Italy’.

The connection between Italian migration and colonialism, politically mobilised by Fascism, was already crucial in the Liberal period; see Labanca, Oltremare. Storia dell'espansione coloniale italiana.

See Orestano, opening address, pp. 23–24.

Louis Leakey to the President of the Volta Meeting, Arcivio dell'Accademia Reale d'Italia (Rome, Italy, onwards AARI), Tito Villa Folder 34, fasc. 50, cart. 13, folio 76–8.

Charles Seligman to Italian Embassy in London, AARI, TiT. VIII Folder 36, Fasc. 50, cart. 22/210.

Lidio Cipriani, ‘Il problema semitico’, Corriere della sera (13 August 1938), pp. 2–3. For Malinowski's letters of complaint to Francesco Orestano, see AARI, TiT. VIII Folder 35, fasc. 50, cart. 32, folio 338–45.

This was, for example, the case of Prof. Westermann from Berlin who was not welcome ‘for his all‐out negrophilic thesis’, AARI, TiT. VIII Folder 33, fasc. 50, cart. 2, folio 20.

‘la libera espansione delle straripanti stirpi europee’, Orestano opening Conference address, p. 23.

See the lecture given by Lidio Cipriani, ‘Razze africane e civiltà dell'Europa’.

‘Ma sino a che si portano uomini di colore a combattere in Europa contro Europei, è piuttosto difficile domandare la solidarietà europea di fronte alle rivolte di colore’. The intervention by Francesco Coppola is reproduced in the debate following the Session on Colonialism, Accademia Reale d'Italia, Fondazione Alessandro Volta. Convegno di Scienze morali e storiche, 14–20 novembre 1932‐XI: tema: l'Europa, p. 488.

‘È poi veramente possibile ottenere una fusione spirituale fra uomini appartenenti a razze diverse, con differente cultura e mentalità, abitudini e tradizioni …? No. Chi conosce l'anima umana e dei popoli nelle sue profondità differenziali, non potrà mai ammettere una simile trasformazione specialmente tra “bianchi” e “neri” ’, Solaroff, ‘Lo spirito contemporaneo della politica coloniale in Africa’, p. 836.

See Stoler & Cooper, ‘Between Metropole and Colony: Rethinking a Research Agenda’.

The term ‘madama’ in Italian is ambivalent. Borrowed from the French ‘madame’, it was nevertheless often used to refer to women who ran brothels. The term ‘madamato’ was used moreover as a way of describing concubinage between Italian men and Eritrean women; it is rooted in the colonial translation of the practices of temporary marriage contract which, in the context of interracial relationships, were linked in Eritrea to the institution of ‘demoz’. On the origins of the ‘word’ grounded on anthropological interpretation of local practices see Sorgoni, Parole e corpi, pp. 127–38.

In 1938 in a circular letter issued by Guglielmo Nasi—the Shoa's Governor—the admiration for African women's naked bodies was addressed as something hurting Italian ‘popular feelings’ and intimacy with them was said to damage ‘Italian prestige’. The circular ended with the warning: ‘Signori! AUT IMPERIUM AUT VOLUPTAS’ [Men! Either empire or pleasure!], quoted in Goglia & Grassi, Il colonialismo italiano da Adua all'Impero, p. 394.

The legal debate was linked to the implementation of 1937 law developed in juridical journals like Razza e Civiltà, Rivista di Diritto Penale and Rivista giuridica del Medio ed Estremo Oriente e Giustizia Coloniale. For a close reading of a survey of 49 ruling judgments see Gabrielli, ‘La persecuzione delle “unioni miste” (1937–1940) nei testi delle sentenze pubblicate e nel dibattito giuridico’ and Barrera, Dangerous Liaisons: Colonial Concubinage in Eritrea 1890–1941.

Although the permanence of a certain degree of doubt about what ‘affectio maritalis’ meant, this was what Giovanni Rosso in the pages of Razza e Civiltà considered to be a shared conclusion taken by the Italian jurisprudence; in Rosso, ‘Definizione dell'espressione “relazione d'indole coniugale” del reato di madamismo’, p. 683.

Mura, Sambadù, amore negro.

See Fabre, L'Elenco. Censura razzista, editoria e autori ebrei, pp. 22–8.

Italian colonial literature has not yet attracted the attention it deserves, not particularly in literary terms but as a quite helpful historical source. For a general survey see Tommasello, La letteratura coloniale italiana dalle avanguardie al fascismo. Strictly connected to the subject covered by this article is the work by Bonavita, ‘Lo sguardo dall'alto. Le forme della razzizazione nei romanzi coloniali e nella narrativa esotica’, and Bonavita, ‘L'amore ai tempi del razzismo. Discriminazioni di razza e di genere nella narrativa fascista’.

By ‘orientalist romance’ I refer to novels and plots loosely based in North Africa and the Middle East and which involved mainly non‐European characters. It is a literary genre that developed basically in the first decades of the twentieth century. Filippo Marinetti's Mafarka le futuriste (1909) reproduce many of the features of the genre, even if in a quite peculiar and original version. For the implications in terms of gendered imagination and projections, see the brilliant analyses provided by Spackman, Fascist Virilities: Rethoric, ideology, and Social Fantasy in Italy, pp. 49–76.

The sharp divide between overt tolerance towards interracial mixing during the liberal colonialism and an overtly racist condemnation of it by fascist colonialism is a quite stereotyped interpretation shared by most of the Italian colonial historiography. For a clever and documented critique see Sorgoni, Parole e corpi. Conversely, the tension between the use of eroticised images of African women by colonial propaganda in order to attract Italian colonists to East Africa and the contempt and disgust for the African woman's body and sexuality is a recurrent theme throughout colonial literature. It deserves a specific analysis which is beyond the aims of this article.

In a renowned page from his book, Gino Mitrano Sani, one of the champions of colonial genres involving sexualised, if not pornographic, representations of African women, wrote: ‘The Italian captain had no tenderness for his female, yet his words wanted to be reassuring. Because, what were the girls if not a body removed from over there, from a tribe, from its jurisdiction, in order to appease the abstinence of his self‐imposed exile? Was not he the master and she the slave?’ [Il capitano italiano nessuna tenerezza aveva per la femina sua, pure le sue parole volevano avere un senso tranquillizzante. Perché cosa era la ragazza se non un corpo preso lì, da una tribù della sua giurisdizione, per placare l'astinenza di quell'esilio volontario? Non erano egli il padrone ed ella la schiava?], in Mitrano Sani, Femmina somala, Romanzo coloniale del Benadir, p. 30.

The term was borrowed from the French ‘ensablé’ and literally meant being kept in the sand. It is again one of the many pieces of evidence of the identification between Africa and desert, and the specific meaning it acquired in the Italian colonial imaginary given that sand stands for both African culture and African women who suck up, or absorb, Italian colonists. Although the connection with interracial relationships is not thematised see Le Houérou, L'épopée des soldats de Mussolini en Abyssinie, les Ensablés. (1936–1938)

‘Le romantisme est le grand absent des relations Hommes/Femmes, au temps de colonie’. ‘Peu (ou pas) de tendresse dans les rencontres. Peu (ou pas) d'émois, d'ésperances, des phrases murmurées, de frôlements de mains, de premiers baisers’, Ruscio, Amours Coloniales, p. 15.

Lucie Cousturier (1870–1925), a French painter, in 1920 devoted the text Des inconnus chez moi to eschewing colonial stereotypes and to offering a highly critical account of the way in which the tiralleurs sénégalais were welcome in the South of France during the First War World. See R. Little, introduction to the text, reprinting (Cousturier, Des inconnus chez moi). Louise Faure‐Favier (1870–1961) was the first woman to fly across the English Channel, a passion to which she dedicated the writing of several guides to the air routes and novels. One of the friends of Guillaume Apollinaire in 1928 published Blanche et noir, a novel involving a love realtionship between a French woman and a Sénégalais man who met during the 1889 Exposition Universelle in Paris; see Little, ‘Blanche et Noir: Louise Faure‐Favier and the Liberated Woman’. Claire Goll (1891–1977) was a Jewish German writer who took part in the Expressionist Movement and lived for long time in Paris. Her 1926 novel, Der Neger Jupiter raubt Europa, was a reformulation of the myth of Europa's seduction by Jupiter, the latter being identified with an aristocratic black French government official in love with a Franco‐Swedish white woman. On the cultural context of Claire Goll life see Mahlow, ‘Die Liebe, die uns immers zur Hemmung wurde…’ Weibliche Identitätproblematik zwischen Expressionismus und Neuer Sachlichkeit am Beispiel der Prosa Claire Goll, and E. Robertson & R. Vilain, Yvan Goll–Claire Goll. Text and Context, and on the specific novel quoted see McGowan, ‘Black and White? Claire Goll's “Der Neger Jupiter raubt Europa” ’.

Mura was the pen‐name of Maria Nannipieri Volpi, a very popular writer whose fame was due to her novels and her collaborations on many women's magazines as ‘Piccola’ and ‘Lei’, while working as well for the cinema as a screenplay writer. Her fame was fuelled by able management of her own image and her membership, even if moderate and shrewd, of a certain literary jet set, on the remotely dannunzian model of the overlap between art and life. Between 1920 and 1940 (when she died in a plane crash), she wrote about 50 novels and stories, which often reached 200 000 copies, quite an extraordinary achievement for those years. Sambadù amore negro was part of a series of novels published and attached to the women's magazine ‘Novella’ with the same title, and should be inscribed in a genre quite popular in that period that combined the tradition of the feuilleton with that of serialised novel. In many regards, the novel reproduced the conventions of the genre: both in its limited length and in the presence of several plates that illustrated the plot and were signed by the well‐known illustrator Marcello Dudovich. For Mura's bio‐bibliographical profile see De Donato & Gazzola Stacchini, I Best Sellers del Ventennio. Il regime e il libro di massa, p. 704.

The first book which brought her notoriety in 1919 was indeed Vecchie perfidie (Old perfidies), a novel involving a lesbian love story.

See Berliner, Ambivalent Desire: The Exotic Black Other in Jazz Age France.

She is addressed as ‘Jo’, a black dancer who ‘dances like the devil with shouts of enthusiasm, and reveals her savoury ebony coloured nakedness, with small bare breasts, malicious and as impudent as curiosity’ [balla con una diavoleria che trascina al grido di entusiasmo, e rivela una saporosa nudità color ebano, con i piccoli seni scoperti, perfidi e sfrontati come la curiosità], in Mura, Sambadù, amore negro, p. 65. In France during the 1920s miscegenation was a very lively subject of debate not only in connection with the Black Vogue but also in connection with the debate on the use of French black troops on the left bank of the Rhine after the war. Both processes intersected in the representation of interracial love in popular imagination and literature; for a survey see Ezra, The Colonial Unconscious: Race and Culture in Interwar France. See White, ‘Miscegenation and the Popular Imagination’, for a more specific analysis of the survey on the ‘relationship between coloured men and French women’ that appeared in women's illustrated magazines.

Italian writers and intellectuals such as Filippo Tommazo Marinetti and Massimo Bontempelli visited Paris several times during the second half of the 1920s and were very impressed; for their reactions both to Josephine Baker's Revue Nègre and the Colonial Exhibition see Mollica, Chèz Joséphine. Omaggio a Joséphine Baker.

The concept of ‘syntax of fantasy’ is taken from Laplanche and Pontalis, ‘Fantasy and the Origins of Sexuality’, and combined with the notion of fantasy as framed in fetishistic disavowal as suggested by Žižeck, The Sublime Object of Ideology.

Silvia's widowhood has several implications. First of all, it makes the relationship more acceptable rather than one involving a white young virgin. Furthermore, it reinforces the emancipated character of Silvia, as an experienced woman with firm self‐control over her private life. The old roots of this representation are witnessed by Histoire de Louis Anniaba, a novel by an anonymous author published in 1740. Roger Little has identified the first black hero of French literature, which presented an affair between a widow and an African king. See Little's introduction to Histoire de Louis Anniaba: Roi d'Essenie en Afrique sur la Côte de Guinée. However, in the context of the novel we are analysing, it should also be noted that the ambiguity of the status attached to widows who were liminal figures, between good and bad, whose status allowed them often to take forms of freedom and transgression forbidden to other women.

‘un uomo ormai fuori dalla mia razza e la mia pelle nera non ha più nulla a che fare coi miei pensieri, col mio cuore, con la mia anima, con la mia sensibilità’, Mura, Sambadù, amore negro, p. 6.

See Hoffman, Le Nègre romantique: personnage littéraire et obsession collective.

‘ I capelli ricciuti sono stati pettinati accuratamente e insistentemente, così chora aderiscono al cranio, lucidissimi, togliendo al la testa di Sambadù quell'aspetto selvaggio che mi aveva un poco spaventata. Poi è così diverso! Col colletto e la cravatta, con un vestito grigio impeccabile di taglio e di gusto, distrugge tutte le idee che la sera prima mi aveva suggerito quel suo abbigliamento composto di un pigiama bianco e di una vestaglia rossa. Egli è tornato dinanzi a me, uguale al signore africano che pranza ogni giorno ad una tavola poco distante dalla mia, nella sala da pranzo dell'albergo; uguale al correttissimo signore che si fa da parte quando salgo nell'ascensore e che non entra mai con me; uguale al signore che incontro qualche rara volta nel corridoio dell'albergo, la notte, tornando da teatro o da qualche festa, vestito di uno smoking o di un frak elegantissimi', ibid., p. 9.

For data on the few individuals of African origin in interwar Italy see Gabrielli, ‘Africani in Italia negli anni del razzismo di Stato’.

Gilman, On Blackness without Blacks: Essays on the Image of the Black in Germany.

The way in which sameness and alterity produce each other in the colonial setting in my analyses is framed by Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity. I would like to thank Jo Labanyi for pointing out to me the relevance of Taussig's text for my research.

‘ la sua maniera di sentire europea trapiantata in un'anima equatoriale’, Mura, Sambadù, amore negro, p. 7.

‘Di lui, soprattutto, mi piace il nome, l'indolenza dello sguardo, e l'atteggiamento rassegnato di animale devoto fino alla morte … la nervosità che gli fa tremare le labbra e le mani; e la passionalità che ridesta in lui commozioni improvvise e intrattenibili come se fosse una donna sensibile a tutti gli stati d'animo ed a tutte le sfumature del sentimento’, ibid., p. 7.

‘Sentimentalmente, egli è più forte, più irruente, più espansivo di me’, ibid., p. 24.

‘Questo colosso nero ha la gelosia di un Otello e il cuore di una fanciulla’, ibid., p. 21.

‘ le grosse labbra di Sambadù sono calde e morbide: l'odore della sua pelle è inebriante. È un curioso odore un po' acre, raddolcito appena dai profumi e riscaldato dalla nicotina e dall'oppio delle sigarette. Questo odore curioso, differente da tutti gli odori dei bianchi, mi attrae sensualmente fino allo stordimento: forse l'attrazione fisica che provo verso di lui, ha origine in questo suo odore particolare che mi fa chiudere gli occhi e socchiudere le labbra’, ibid., p. 53.

With regard to British context see Sinha, Colonial Masculinity: The ‘Manly Englishman’ and the ‘Effeminate Bengali’ in the Late Nineteenth Century, while for the French context Alice C. Conklin has argued that it did not simply work as a way of equating the colonised with the private realm to justify exclusion from the public and political world, but has also worked to describe the African subject as irrational and insufficiently civilised. It employed the same argument used to deny women suffrage in France, in Conklin, Redefining ‘Frenchness’: Citizenship, Race Regeneration, and Imperial Motherhood in France and West Africa, 1914–1940', p. 67.

‘Come se le parole invece che dalle sue grosse mani fossero state tracciate da piccole mani di donna’, Mura, Sambadù, amore negro, p. 26.

‘Tuttavia, Silvia, se tu sapessi quante volte mi son detto ‘Ella non potrà mai, così bianca, così bionda, amare te, così nero!’ E sentivo che tutta la mia anima divenuta latina, si smarriva e implorava di ritornare un'anima selvaggia', ibid., p. 54.

‘penso come sarebbe dolce se in questo momento, al buio, le braccia di Sambadù mi circondassero, mi stringessero, ed io sentissi accanto al mio volto la morbidezza della sua pelle calda. Ma bisognerebbe che fosse sempre buio e che non mi accorgessi mai del suo volto nero, della sue labbra scure, delle sue mani violacee sul palmo’, ibid., p. 23.

‘ Lo guardo nella penombra con una specie di timore che tento di nascondere in tutti i modi. Gli occhi, ora, sembrano più grandi, con la cornea di smalto bianchissima e la pupilla troppo lucida, piccolissima, nell'iride un po’ schiarita. L'impressione più violenta la ricevo dalle sue mani così assolutamente nere sul dorso e così violacee nel cavo, da far pensare a qualche cosa di artificiale che si può cancellare o mutare, con un gesto, come fosse una truccatura. Ma il mio vicino di casa è un autentico negro, e tale rimarrà nonostante la mia illusione', ibid., p. 5.

‘Comincio a considerare la sua pelle nera senza più timore: egli è tale uomo capace di dominare gli altri dall'alto della sua orgogliosa inferiorità di razza’, ibid., p. 43.

‘le mani nere sulle ginocchia coperte di grigio’, ibid., p. 20.

It is difficult here not to be reminded of the sentence ‘Mama, look a nigger! I'm frightened’ with which Frantz Fanon starts the chapter ‘The Fact of Blackness’ in his Black Skin, Whites Masks, and of his psychoanalytic reading of the relation between coloniser and colonised.

‘ [al suo] volto si sostituisce quello del signore negro veduto poco fa, con le labbra troppo grosse, il naso schiacciato, e gli occhi lunghi, tirati sulle tempie come quelli dei cinesi’, ibid., p. 33.

‘Mentre serve il té, tento di figurarmelo in abito da cerimonia, come certe fotografie di negri che ho veduto riprodotte nei giornali illustrati’, Mura, Sambadù, amore negro, p. 22.

‘Penso di avere i capelli lungo le spalle, legati in due trecce d'oro, come una castellana, e immagino che Sambadù sia il mio signore, armato di lancia e di scudo, avvolto in un burnus candido’, ibid., p. 43.

‘penso a questo figlio che il nostro amore non potrà fare a meno di concepire, ad un piccolo bimbo che si aggrapperà al mio seno bianco con le sue manine…questa visione mi ha rabbrividire. Il sangue del mio bambino sarà inquinato dal sangue d'un'altra razza, e porterà in sé i germi selvaggi d'una tribù negra. Basterò io sola a dargli un'anima latina, a questa creatura che avrà nelle vene sangue misto?’, ibid., pp. 71–2.

‘…un tono da padrone che non vuole dare spiegazioni, non ammette replica’, ibid., p. 73.

‘A me pare che ogni volta senta il bisogno di persuadersi che veramente sono sua, la sua donna bianca, sua moglie. E credo che ogni volta sorga in lui un'ondata di orgoglio e di dominio: il bacio che mi dà, è il bacio del padrone. Un padrone innamorato che fa guardare a vista la sua preda’, ibid., p. 80.

‘mi pare che gradatamente ritorni alle origini, abolendo i lunghi anni di adattamento e di acclimatazione europei. Ora che ha raggiunto lo scopo della sua vita, ora che il sogno s’è fatto realtà, perché per conquistare una donna bianca e per condurla al matrimonio non ha più bisogno della sua fittizia veste di civilizzato, perché affaticarsi ad esser quel che in fondo non è, cioè un uomo nero con un'anima di bianco?', ibid., p. 83.

‘egli ha perduto quello stile, quell'attitudine che faceva di lui un europeo civilizzato’, ibid., p. 78.

‘Non appena la vita esteriore entra con tutte le sue necessità di affiatamento, di armonia, di uguaglianze sociali, di libertà individuali, sento che qualcosa si sgretola, che qualcosa rode alle fondamenta l'edificio appena innalzato della nostra famiglia’, ibid., p. 80.

The claim of European superiority in combining these two forms of love as the pinnacle of the long‐lasting European evolution was indeed at the very centre of the debate on courtly love developed in this period, for example, by Denis de Rougemont, L'Amour et l'Occident and Clives Staples Lewis, The Allegory of Love; for a survey on the interwar debate and a close reading of these two texts see Passerini, Europe and Love.

‘può darsi che non incontrerò mai più un uomo che possa amarmi con tanta passione, tanta intensità, tanto dominio e insieme tanto servilismo; non mi sentirò mai più superiore all'uomo che mi ama, non mi verrà più il desiderio di frustrare’, Mura, Sambadù, amore negro, p. 93.

‘mi toglierò l'impaccio del colletto e getterò lungo la via del ritorno tutti i bagagli della civiltà e dell'educazione … ritroverò i miei istintini primitivi, parlerò il linguaggio dei miei avi’, ibid., p. 95.

Little, Between Totem and Taboo: Black Man, White Woman in Francographic Literature.

Mbembe, On the Postcolony.

The relevance of the notion of ‘interior frontiers’ as a discursive structure distinguished by the one at work in the definition of cultural and political external boundaries has been brought to my research by the work of Ann Laura Stoler on the cultural policing of European métis in colonial Indochina, to which it is in debt. See Stoler, ‘Sexual Affronts and Racial Frontiers. Cultural Competence and the Dangers of Métissage’.