Il pieno e il vuoto: Visual Representations of Africa in Italian Accounts of Colonial Experiences

Abstract

The article examines the role played by photographs and other kinds of illustrations in accounts written by Italian travellers to Africa from the beginning of Italy’s colonial experience till today. Using sample publications from Liberal Italy, the years of Fascism, and the post-colonial period, it analyses the way in which texts and images interact, constructing complex representations of people and places which cannot be reduced to any ‘realist’ and ‘factual’ interpretation. The insistence on particular images as well as the absence of others played a key role in producing representations which responded to the needs of propaganda, or occasionally managed to signal the author’s self-distancing from the goals and practices of Italy’s colonial politics.

Keywords:

• Africa
• travel writing
• photography
• illustrations
• colonialism

Notes

* I would like to thank the AHRC’s Diasporas, Migration and Identities research programme for its support to the workshop series ‘Mobility and Identity Formation: An Interdisciplinary Approach to the “Italian Case”’, which allowed me to pursue work developed in the present article. I would also like to thank colleagues who responded to initial versions of this article presented at conferences and seminars held at the Universities of Warwick and Nottingham Trent.

1 ‘Africa’ is obviously used here as a shorthand. There were, and there are, many, plural Africas, many cultures, and many histories within one continent; but it is also true that colonialism tended to produce a reductionist image of the continent; as a result, that shorthand came to embody a very common simplification, and was often taken quite literally during the period covered in this article.

2 On photography and its relationship to other media in the history of Italian colonialism see Silvana Palma, L’Italia coloniale, Storia fotografica della società italiana (Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1999); Alessandro Triulzi, ‘Napoli e l’immagine dell’Africa nella collezione fotografica della Società Africana d’Italia (ca. 1880–1940)’, in Culture dell’alterità, ed. by Emanuela Casti e Angelo Turco (Milan: Unicopli, 1998), pp. 185–205 (see ­especially p. 200).

3 See for instance Rivista di storia e critica della fotografia, 4:5 (June–October 1983), special issue on ‘Fotografie e colonialismo’; AFT — Archivio Fotografico Toscano, 4:8 (December 1988), almost entirely devoted to colonial photography; as well as Palma, L’Italia coloniale; Alessandro Triulzi (ed.), L’Africa dall’immaginario alle immagini: Scritti e immagini dell’Africa nei fondi della Biblioteca Reale (Turin: Salone del Libro/Regione Piemonte, 1989); Luigi Goglia (ed.), Colonialismo e fotografia: il caso italiano (Sicania: Messina, 1989). This last volume is symptomatic of the tendency to isolate photography from other forms of representation: in his introductory article, ‘Africa, colonialismo, fotografia: il caso italiano (1885–1940)’ (pp. 9–59), Goglia states that both the volume and the exhibition which it accompanied were intentionally devoted ‘al documento ­fotografico, tralasciando deliberatamente quello scritto ed altre immagini iconografiche’ (p. 9).

4 A notable exception is constituted by the already mentioned issue of AFT — Archivio Fotografico Toscano devoted to colonial photography; see in particular contributions by Triulzi and Labanca. More recently, Acquarelli has also underlined the importance of the link between the meaning of a photograph and its context of reception in ‘La fotografia e il colonialismo. Visioni sul Congo’, in Tenebre bianche: Immaginari coloniali fin de siècle, ed. by Acquarelli et al. (Reggio Emilia: Diabasis, 2008), pp. 171–248 (p. 171).

5 Timothy Dow Adams, Light Writing and Life Writing: Photography in Autobiography (Chapel Hill: ­University of North Carolina Press, 1999), pp. xi–xii.

6 On the indexical nature of photography see the by now classic discussion in Charles Sanders Pierce, ­Philosophical Writings of Pierce, selected and edited with an introduction by Justus Buchler (Dover Publications: New York, 1955), pp. 98–119; on its referentiality see in particular Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. by Richard Howard (New York: Farrar, Staus, Giroux, 1981).

7 See Acquarelli, especially pp. 175–81. It should also be noted that this connection between travel, travel writing, and photography did not happen in a discursive void. As observed by Crawshaw and Urry, in fact, ‘professional photographers follow the dictates of a dominant conception and construct images in accordance with it. Indeed the travel photographer and the tourist seem to engage in a mutually reinforcing social process, of constructing and altering images of places and experiences’; Carol Crawshaw and John Urry, ‘Tourism and the Photographic Eye’, in Touring Cultures: Transformations of Travel and Theory, ed. by Chris Rojek and John Urry (London: Routledge, 1997), pp. 176–95 (p. 194).

8 Palma states that ‘[l]a “massificazione” della fotografia che ha luogo nell’ultimo ventennio del XIX secolo coincide, per un verso, con l’adesione italiana allo scramble for Africa e, per l’altro, con la crescita della stampa illustrata che fa del ricorso alle immagini, soprattutto quelle realizzate dai fotografi commerciali, il mezzo privilegiato di diffusione del sapere italiano sull’Africa’; Silvana Palma, ‘Fotografia di una colonia: l’Eritrea di Luigi Naretti (1885–1900)’, Quaderni storici, 37:109 (1) (2002), 83–147 (p. 84). On the subject see also Palma, L’Italia coloniale, and Acquarelli.

9 Reflections on this theme can be found in Nicola Labanca, ‘I nostri antenati: Uno sguardo coloniale. Immagine e propaganda nelle fotografie e nelle illustrazioni del primo colonialismo italiano (1882–1896)’, in AFT — Archivio Fotografico Toscano, 4:8 (December 1988), pp. 43–61 (p. 43).

10 Leila Koivunen, Visualizing Africa in Nineteenth-Century British Travel Accounts (London: Routledge, 2008) notes the enduring use of sketches and talks of ‘competition’ between these and photography (p. 38). Labanca, in ‘I nostri antenati’ (especially pp. 48–51) discusses the co-existence of illustrations and photography; he also notes that, in spite of the availability of photographic sources, illustrations did not necessarily adopt a realist language, but rather continued to propose exotic stereotypes and emotionally charged (as well as partial) representations of the colonies.

11 See Koivunen for a detailed discussion of technical processes and problems.

12 This remains true even when the traveller’s own sketches are used as illustrations. Sketches, in fact, were usually made during the journey, but in quiet moments, when the traveller could sit down and collect his/her impressions. A gap is therefore still present between experience and its representation, especially when the latter depicts an event or incident, rather than a landscape or portrait; on this subject see Koivunen. Blogs and other forms of electronic communication may in part be changing this relationship, yet the evidence seems to point to the endurance of practices which involve multiple drafting and editing, at least for travel texts of sustained length. Even though the gap between experience and publication may be getting shorter, the parallel increase in the speed and ease of re-drafting, for instance, leads to the endurance of forms of textual manipulation, revision, and re-framing.

13 Cited in Acquarelli, p. 193.

14 The expression is used in Acquarelli, p. 183.

15 V. Y. Mudimbe, The Idea of Africa (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1994), p. xii. A similar dichotomy is also described by Triulzi, who identifies the two extremes as ‘l’Africa della seduzione’ and ‘l’Africa come repulsione’; see Alessandro Triulzi, ‘L’Africa dall’immaginario alle immagini’, in L’Africa dall’immaginario alle immagini, pages not numbered.

16 On exoticism in travel writing and its endurance see in particular Charles Forsdick, Victor Segalen and the Aesthetics of Diversity: Journeys between Cultures (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).

17 For these and other biographical details see Gustavo Bianchi, Esplorazioni in Africa di Gustavo Bianchi: Memorie ordinate e pubblicate dal Dottor Dino Pesci (Milan: Vallardi, 1887), especially ‘Prefazione’ (pp. v–viii) and ‘Capitolo 1: Introduzione, cenni biografici, carattere del Bianchi’ (pp. 1–18). On Bianchi’s writings see also Cristina Lombardi Diop, ‘Writing the Female Frontier: Italian Women in Colonial Africa, 1890–1940’, PhD thesis, New York University (1999).

18 The full title is Gustavo Bianchi, Alla terra dei Galla: Narrazione della spedizione Bianchi in Africa nel 1879–80. Opera illustrata da E. Ximenes sopra schizzi dell’autore (Milan: Treves, 1884); all references will be to the 1886 edition, described as ‘corredata di una prefazione biografica di A. Brunialti e d’una carta geografica della regione percorsa da Gustavo Bianchi’. Bianchi’s account had initially appeared as a series of fascicoli, whose publication was completed only two months before news of Bianchi’s death reached Italy at the end of 1884 (see Brunialti’s preface, p. v). Edoardo Ximenes was one of the most popular illustrators of the time, as well as a ‘giornalista, pittore e fotografo, cofondatore e condirettore con Emilio Treves de “L’Illustrazione Italiana”’; see Goglia, ‘Africa, colonialismo, fotografia’, p. 19. On Ximenes see also Labanca, ‘I nostri antenati’, pp. 48–49.

19 It is symptomatic that when, in 1930, two collected volumes of Bianchi’s writing were produced (coinciding with public celebrations for the fiftieth anniversary of the explorer’s death, organized by the Fascist regime), the original portrait was reproduced, facing the title page of vol. 1, but was also supplemented in vol. 2 by a photograph of the author (a bust, in civilian clothes) placed in the same position and framed by the words ‘Gustavo Bianchi. Esploratore in Africa. Ucciso dai Danakil, 1884’. Other photographs, mostly taken by the explorer Ludovico Nesbitt, who wrote a preface to the volumes, were also included in the text, where they played a role entirely different from that of Ximenes’s illustrations: the direct relationship with the narrative is abolished, while the photographs tend to illustrate typical human and topographical features of the locations visited by Bianchi. Particularly interesting are photos such as the one on p. 33, vol. 2, which is captioned ‘Tipi dancali presso Rasdasa, Dancalia Inferiore. Fot. Ing. Nesbitt’, and shows two men and a bare-breasted young woman (in the foreground) among local vegetation. Bianchi’s figure and his travel accounts were thus being re-inscribed, on the one hand, in an official colonial history made of heroic sacrifices and barbaric assassinations and, on the other, in a racist, objectifying discourse which was increasingly dominant in Fascist Italy. See Gustavo Bianchi, L’ultima spedizione Africana di Gustavo Bianchi: Diari, relazioni, lettere e documenti editi ed inediti. Due volumi a cura di Carlo Zaghi. Prefazione dell’esploratore Ludovico M. Nesbitt, 2 vols (Milan: Alpes, 1930).

20 On this topic see Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York: Routledge, 1995); McClintock specifically talks of ‘a decidedly fetishistic faith in the magical powers of the commodity [which] underpinned much of the colonial civilizing mission’ (p. 227).

21 The episode is narrated on pp. 268–69; the plate occupies most of p. 265, thus anticipating the tale.

22 Luigi Robecchi-Bricchetti, All’Oasi di Giove Ammone (Milan: Treves, 1890). The quotation is from the title page. The illustrations are not attributed.

23 See Luigi Robecchi-Bricchetti, Nell’Harrar (Milan: Galli, 1896); Somalia e Benadir (Milan: Aliprandi, 1899); and Nel paese degli aromi (Milan: Cogliati, 1903).

24 This is even more applicable to the journeys to Somalia, which coincided with the period in which Italy was extending its control over the country, leading to the declaration of a colony in 1908.

25 The distinction is not always clear. As noted by Labanca ‘col tempo e con l’evoluzione del gusto, le ­illustrazioni tanto erano più apprezzate quanto più sembravano “fotografiche”’; many were ‘incisioni verosimili tratte da fotografie’: ‘I nostri antenati’, p. 50.

26 Only a very small number of illustrations attempt to reproduce a specific episode or perhaps a local custom described in the narration (a case in point is ‘La pena del curbash a Siuwah’, a plate which occupies all of p. 165) — but these are the exception, rather than the rule.

27 There are also examples of the type of eroticized images which were to become a staple among illustrated postcards, such as the portrait of the ‘Donna beduina’ (p. 57) which represents a local woman with her head veiled and her chest bared, as if she had just lowered the upper part of her clothes.

28 Rosalia Pianavia Vivaldi, Tre anni in Eritrea (Milan: Cogliati, 1901).

29 See Goglia, ‘Africa, colonialismo, fotografia’, who talks of a ‘caso di non poco interesse, una donna, la ­signora Rosalia Pianavia Vivaldi Bossiner’ (p. 19); Pianavia Vivaldi, ‘che sappiamo in Eritrea dal 1893 al 1895 [...] è l’unica donna italiana fotografa, della quale abbiamo finora notizia, che abbia operato in Africa nel secolo scorso’ (p. 22). Goglia also reports that in 1903 Pianavia Vivaldi was quite exceptionally awarded the ‘medaglia commemorativa delle campagne d’Africa’; the motivation for the award stated that she had made the Eritrean colony popular ‘colla penna e colla fotografia’ (pp. 22–23). On photography and photographers in Eritrea at the end of the nineteenth century see also Palma, ‘Fotografia di una colonia’.

30 This is the case with traditional gender roles, which are also explicitly called into question, for instance, in the two portraits of the author and of her husband placed at the start of the book (on p. 7 and p. 3, respectively). Pianavia Vivaldi chooses to show her husband in full uniform, in an official-looking shot which totally de-contextualizes him and lacks any colonial reference; of herself, on the other hand, she presents a full-figure image, sitting on a horse and looking very much at home in the African landscape. Especially when contrasted with the one of her husband, this portrait can be seen to confound gender stereotypes and reverses the usual sexual hierarchies of colonial society: it affirms the woman’s active role as well as her dominant gaze; and it tells us that, of the two, she was the real colonist.

31 The chapter covers pp. 309–19; see in particular images on pp. 313, 315 and 316. On the invisibility of mixed-race children in colonial photography see Palma, ‘Fotografia di una colonia’, p. 110; on sexual relations in Eritrea see Giulia Barrera, ‘Dangerous Liaisons: Colonial Concubinage in Eritrea, 1891–1941’, PAS working papers 1, Programme of African Studies, Northwestern University (1996), available at http://www.northwestern.edu/african-studies/working%20papers/wp1barrera.pdf [accessed April 2012]; Barbara Sòrgoni, Parole e corpi: Antropologia, discorso giuridico e politiche sessuali interrazziali nella colonia Eritrea (1890–1941) (Naples: Liguori, 1998).

32 Vittorio Tedesco Zammarano, Hic Sunt Leones: Un anno di esplorazioni e di caccia in Somalia (Mondadori, Milan, 1930). He was also the author of colonial novels, such as Azanagò non pianse: Romanzo d’Africa (Milan: Mondadori, 1934) and books for children like Cuoresaldo a caccia grossa (Milan: Mondadori, 1934).

33 Tourist guides of the African colonies were already available in the 1930s; see for instance Guida d’Italia: Possedimenti e colonie (Milan: Touring Club Italiano, 1929), and Guida d’Italia della Consociazione Turistica Italiana: Africa Orientale Italiana (Milan: Consociazione Turistica Italiana, 1938). On the development of colonial tourism see Brian L. McLaren, ‘The Architecture of Tourism in Italian Libya: The Creation of a Mediterranean Identity’, in Italian Colonialism, ed. by Ruth Ben Ghiat and Mia Fuller (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), pp. 167–78.

34 He directed Il sentiero delle belve: Sensazionali avventure di caccia del Tenente Colonnello V. T. Zammarano nell’Africa Orientale Italiana (1932); on Tedesco Zammarano’s film see Gian Piero Brunetta and Jean A. Gili, L’ora d’Africa nel cinema italiano: 1911–1989 (La grafica — Mori: Trento, 1990).

35 Onorina Bargagli Petrucci, Nel Fezzan (Aprile-Maggio 1932) (Florence: Bemporad 1934).

36 See the two images of the traveller’s car reproduced on p. 32. The photographs are placed on the same page, one above the other. The first captures the mechanical vehicle as it is passing the remains of a dead camel; the caption reads: ‘Fra Ba Ngem e Hon — Prematuro elogio dell’automobile di fronte al cammello annientato’. The second picture shows attempts to repair the car, which has broken down, and is accompanied by the following words: ‘A 47 chilometri da Hon. Dove siamo obbligati a riconoscere ingiusto l’apprezzamento in favore dell’auto, di fronte al cammello!’. The tone is clearly meant to be humorous. And there is no sense of real terror at being stuck in the middle of the desert.

37 Lidio Cipriani, Un assurdo etnico: L’impero etiopico (Florence: Bemporad, 1935); In Africa, dal Capo al Cairo (Florence: Bemporad, 1932).

38 According to Sòrgoni (p. 174), the 1936 volume ‘altro non è che una giustapposizione e un collage di parti tratte da tutte le sue opere precedenti’, re-packaged as an anti-Ethiopian pamphlet. On Cipriani see also Alberto Baldi, ‘L’impiego della fotografia nell’indagine di carattere etno-antropologico all’interno del periodo coloniale italiano’, Rivista di storia e critica della fotografia, 4:5 (June–October 1983), 23–53; Alberto Burgio (ed.), Nel nome della razza: Il razzismo nella storia d’Italia, 1870–1945 (Bologna: il Mulino, 1999), especially pp. 203–6.

39 On anthropometric trends in colonial photography and also on the scopophilic tendencies behind the reproduction of fragmented bodies see Acquarelli (especially pp. 189 and 192). While specific links can be drawn with aspects of Italian culture, these like many other aspects of colonial photography were not confined to Italian authors and contexts; see for instance Koivunen (p. 93) for a discussion of the conventions of anthropometric photography in a British context.

40 Susan Sontag, in On Photography (New York: Picador USA, 1990) describes a photograph as ‘something directly stencilled off the real, like a footprint or a death mask’ (p. 154).

41 Carlo Fettarappa Sandri, Il periplo dell’Affrica dopo la vittoria (Milan: Ceschina, 1937).

42 See for instance ‘Panorama di Mogadiscio dall’aeroplano’, (p. 33).

43 The prominence assigned to modern technology and, in particular, to airplanes, in Fettarappa Sandri’s volume is far from being unusual; besides the examples mentioned above when discussing Bianchi and, more pertinently, Bargagli Petrucci, see also the photographs included in Amedeo di Savoia Aosta, Studi Africani (Bologna: Zanichelli, 1942).

44 On this kind of nostalgic production see Charles Burdett, ‘Colonial Associations and the Memory of Italian East Africa’, in Italian Colonialism: Legacy and Memory, ed. by Jacqueline Andall and Derek Duncan (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2005), pp. 125–42.

45 The latest edition of Desio’s volume is Le vie della sete (Faenza: Polaris, 2006).

46 On the role of geography and geographers during Italy’s occupation of Libya see David Atkinson, ‘The Politics of Geography and the Italian Occupation of Libya’, Libyan Studies, 27 (1996), 71–84; ‘Geographical Knowledge and Scientific Survey in the Construction of Italian Libia’, Modern Italy, 8:1 (2003), 9–29; and ‘Constructing Italian Africa: Geography and Geopolitics’, in Ben Ghiat and Fuller, pp. 15–26.

47 Stefano Malatesta, Il Grande Mare di Sabbia: Storie del deserto (Vicenza: Neri Pozza, 2001).

48 Ribka Sibhatu, Aulò: Canto poesia dell’Eritrea. Illustrazioni di Marco Petrella e Ribka Sibhatu (Rome: Sinnos, 1993; 2nd edn 1998).

49 Palma, ‘Fotografia di una colonia’, p. 90.