From Pecore nere to Future: Anthologizing intersectional Blackness in contemporary Italy

ABSTRACT

This article develops an analysis of Future (2019), the first anthology to bring together texts by Black Italian women and non-binary writers of African and Caribbean descent, and reads it in continuity with the pioneering anthology Pecore nere (Black Sheep) (2005), the first collection of short stories to thematize racial difference in postcolonial Italy. It initially articulates a reflection on the anthology as an autonomous genre that has had both a conservative and an innovative function in Italian literature and culture, and then examines how Future openly deploys an intersectional approach to denounce structural racism and sexism and to displace the white and whitening colonial male gaze. The article, furthermore, highlights how Future participates in a transnational creative and critical conversation with other Black feminists, Black Mediterranean and Black European authors, thus contributing to the de-centralization of US narratives about race while further enriching the debate about processes of racialization in Europe.

KEYWORDS:

• Anthology
• Italian postcolonial literature
• intersectionality
• Blackness
• gender
• transnational trajectories

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. Such theoretical reflection was initiated by Genévieve Makaping’s ([2001] 2022) Traiettorie di sguardi. E se gli altri foste voi? (Reversing the Gaze: What if the Other Were You?) the first text written in Italian and published in Italy by a Black female author that for the first time theorized on the intersection of race, gender, and color in Italy, and denounced contemporary racism as a legacy of colonialism. Traiettorie has just been republished in Italian and will soon be available in English translation (Makaping forthcoming).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Caterina Romeo

Caterina Romeo is an associate professor at Sapienza University of Rome, where she teaches literary theory, migration studies, postcolonial studies, and gender studies. She is the author of Interrupted Narratives and Intersectional Representations in Italian Postcolonial Literature (2022). She has co-edited Postcolonial Italy (2012) and a special issue of the Postcolonial Studies Journal titled Postcolonial Europe (2015), and translated into Italian the work of numerous Italian American women writers.