Black women at war: The Shadow King (2019), Cronache dalla polvere (2019), and intersectional violence in contemporary Italy

ABSTRACT

Through a comparative analysis of Maaza Mengiste’s award-winning The Shadow King (2019) and Zoya Barontini’s collective mosaic novel Cronache dalla polvere (Chronicles from the dust) (2019), this article traces the roots of contemporary Italy’s intersectional violence back to the country’s colonial history. While the Ethiopian American Mengiste redresses the masculine language of war by dramatizing the historical experience of Ethiopian female partisans, the Italian authors of Cronache dalla polvere deliberately assign to Ethiopian female characters the task of recording, remembering, and retelling the atrocities committed by the Italian fascists against the local population. Drawing on interdisciplinary explorations of the intersections among race, gender, and class in contemporary Italy by Heather Merrill and Gaia Giuliani, and in Italian postcolonial literature by Caterina Romeo, it seeks to demonstrate how the two novels attempt to reorient the Italian literary archive in ways that illuminate the colonial matrix of the country’s persistent culture of intersectional violence.

KEYWORDS:

• The Shadow King
• Cronache dalla polvere (Chronicles from the dust)
• intersectional violence
• Italo Ethiopian archive
• Ethiopian women fighters
• Italian colonialism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. This and all subsequent translations from Italian are mine, unless otherwise stated.

2. In her account of writing The Shadow King, Mengiste recalls how, before learning about her great-grandmother’s active participation in the war as a soldier, she had bought into the very masculine version of the story handed down from older generations: “In this war, men stumbled but did not fall. Men gasped but did not die. Those white-clad men ran towards bullets and tanks, heroic and Homeric, myths brought to life. I would shut my eyes and see it all unfold: a thousand furious Achilles’s shaking off that deadly cut and rising onto undamaged feet again and again” (2019b).

3. Scego’s chapter references the unprecedented wave of black support for Ethiopia, cutting across location, nationality, and class positioning, triggered by Mussolini’s invasion in 1935. This violent event was notoriously among the crucial factors in the “reconfiguration of notions of race and nationality in the evolution of political consciousness among diasporic Africans” (Srivastava 2018b, 101).

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Mara Mattoscio

Mara Mattoscio is lecturer in English literature at the University of Macerata, Italy. She is the author of Corpi affetti. Il Sudafrica di Nadine Gordimer dalla pagina allo schermo (2018) and has published extensively on anglophone postcolonial literature and film, with a special focus on the intersections between race and gender and on African and diasporic authors from a comparative perspective.