Of pink (and red) paint, Black lives (that matter), and intersectionality in Italy

Intersectional Italy: Preliminary considerations

During the International Women’s Day rally in Milan organized by the transfeminist movement Non Una di Meno (Not one less) on March 8, 2019, feminists activists threw pink paint at the statue of notorious journalist Indro Montanelli who, during the Ethiopian campaign, had bought himself a 12-year-old “wife” (see Serena Volpi and Selby Wynn Schwartz in this Special Issue).¹ They were protesting the processes of memorialization undertaken by the city of Milan, where that statue had been erected to commemorate Montanelli’s intellectual role in post-war Italian society. Such commemoration, however, obliterated the dark pages of Italian colonialism and the sexual and domestic exploitation of Black women’s bodies at the hands of white Italian colonizers.² The same statue became the target of another attack – this time with red paint – during the rally organized by anti-racist activists in May 2020, following the Black Lives Matter global mobilization in reaction to the brutal assassination of George Floyd by a police officer in Minneapolis. These two different actions emphasized that colonialism was a social and political system in which power relations were structured around the intersection of race and gender as interlocking categories of oppression. Such actions furthermore highlighted that understanding racial and gender violence in the present requires a deep knowledge of colonial history and a collective commitment to cultural decolonization.

Intersectionality, both as a theoretical framework and a methodological tool, has only recently been embraced in Italy (see, among others, Bonfiglioli et al. 2009; Perilli and Ellena 2012; Marchetti 2012; Merrill 2006, 2018; Kan 2021; Giovanni Bello 2020; Marini-Maio, Bonifazio, and Nerenberg 2021), a country that has shaped its national identity around the presumed “chromatic norm” (Romeo 2012) of whiteness. Intersectional methodology was conceived in the context of Black³ feminism and feminism of Color in the United States and theorized by the Combahee River Collective (1977). Black feminists rejected the notion of universal sisterhood among all women and underlined the ways in which white women have historically benefited from their white privilege and have reproduced power dynamics in the relationship with racialized women. The term “intersectionality” was coined later by Kimberlé Crenshaw (1989) in the context of three legal cases in which the lack of an intersectional approach had led to the invisibilization of Black women. Such an approach focuses on the multidimensional discrimination that individual subjects and different groups of people experience based on their race,⁴ color, gender, and other axes of oppression (class, sexuality, religion, citizenship, nationality, age, etc.), which need to be taken into account in their intersection and simultaneous presence, rather than as separate categories.

In Italy, the concepts of race and color have generally been under-represented in the social context at large and undertheorized in scholarly discourse and within feminist movements. Incoming migrations to Italy over the past 40 years have rendered Italian society more diverse than in the past. Black authors and authors of Color have emerged who analyse the intersection of gender, race, color, and class in a postcolonial perspective and identify processes of racialization of Black bodies as a colonial legacy. Currently the intersectional perspective is also widely implemented by anti-racist activist associations such as Questa è Roma (This is Rome) and Il Razzismo è una brutta storia (Racism is a Nasty [His]-story), and in the cultural debate promoted by young racialized Italian intellectuals and cultural activists.

This Special Issue originated in the seminar “Intersectional Italy” that we organized for the annual conference of the American Comparative Literature Association in 2020, aiming to promote a conversation on an important issue that is still undertheorized in the Italian cultural context. The brilliant response we received from seminar participants and the lively discussion that developed during the three days of the conference prompted us to coordinate the publication of our reflections. This Special Issue includes eight articles by conference participants and two interviews with writers and intellectuals Djarah Kan and Leaticia Ouedraogo, who discuss intersectionality, Blackness, white privilege, and other related topics. The challenge we presented to contributors was to apply an intersectional methodology to analyse the specificity of the Italian cultural context and to utilize this approach for the cultural analysis (in a broad sense) of different kinds of texts and representations (Camilotti and Crivelli 2017; Romeo 2021).

Structure and articles

Intersectional Italy opens with the interviews we conducted with Djarah Kan and Leaticia Ouedraogo, who each offer a reflection on the material and political implications of the intersection of racism and sexism in the Italian postcolonial context. The importance of self-definition, the limits of the concept of “universal sisterhood”, and the ways in which white privilege materially affects the lives of racialized people in Italy and those of migrants coming from the Global South are the focus in Djarah Kan’s interview. Here the author demonstrates how these issues inform immigration policies, political and cultural debates, and processes of social exclusion. Leaticia Ouedraogo traces the connections between white saviorism and environmentalism, the role of representations and the reproduction of racialization processes, racism and psychological trauma, highlighting the importance of an intersectional approach in promoting a process of active decolonization.

In the opening article, Caterina Romeo analyses the transition from the 2005 anthology Pecore nere (Black Sheep) – which collects texts written by Italian women of African and Asian descent – to the publication in 2019 of Future. Il domani narrato dalle voci di oggi (Futures. Tomorrow Narrated by the Voices of Today), the first collection by female and non-binary Italian writers of African and Caribbean descent, who adopt an intersectional perspective to expose structural racism and sexism. Beginning with an analysis of the anthology as a literary genre that performs a conservative and normative function on the one hand, and an innovative and experimental function on the other, the author scrutinizes the innovativeness of Future as a text that applies an intersectional perspective in the analysis of race, gender, and color in Italy. Angelica Pesarini grounds her analysis in her own family history and uses the oral accounts of her grandmother, born in 1930s Somalia to an Italian father and a Somali mother, as a lens to read the racial and sexual politics of Italian colonialism in the Horn of Africa. The article examines the life experience of Black “mixed-race” children in Apostolic Missions in East Africa during the Italian colonial domination and employs the concepts of the “Archive” and the “body-Archive” in order to question official processes of memorialization and the transmission of history. The focus on Italian colonialism is also at the core of Mara Mattoscio’s article, which underlines the connections between contemporary intersectional violence in Italy and Italian colonial sexism and racism, with an emphasis on the Fascist conquest of Ethiopia (1936). To trace the origins of such violence, the author proposes a comparative analysis of Maaza Mengiste’s novel The Shadow King and Zoya Barontini’s mosaic novel Cronache dalla polvere (Chronicles from the Dust), examining how Mengiste exposes the gender violence inflicted on female fighters in the Ethiopian resistance by both the Italian army and the local soldiers. Focusing on the two novels’ female characters, who are assigned the task of recording, remembering, and transmitting the memory of Fascist violence against the Ethiopian population, the author demonstrates how these texts can reorient the Italian literary archive. Serena Volpi’s article moves from Igiaba Scego’s invitation to transform the debate around Indro Montanelli’s statue into a reflection on what the colonial endeavor entailed, especially with regard to the domination of Black bodies in Africa. The author connects Montanelli’s memories of colonialism in different texts with the rewriting of his colonial narrative in Francesca Melandri’s (2017) novel Sangue Giusto (Right Blood), showing how the notion of memory can be employed as a counter-cartography to reinterpret the present. The covering of Indro Montanelli’s statue in pink paint performed by artivists of the Italian feminist movement Non Una Di Meno (Not One Less) on March 8, 2019, to protest colonial violence against Black women is at the center of Selby Wynn Schwartz’s analysis. The author examines how Non Una Di Meno exposes the intersection of racism and sexism and considers contemporary decolonial and transfeminist initiatives in order to map what Igiaba Scego calls “percorsi postcoloniali” (postcolonial pathways) (Bianchi and Scego 2014) and to trace potential coalitional feminist activism. Annarita Taronna applies an intersectional perspective to translation and translingual writing to analyse language as a space within which concepts of gender, race, and color are transferred, modified, and negotiated within different social and cultural contexts. The author analyses Nadeesha Uyangoda’s memoir L’unica persona nera nella stanza (The Only Black Person in the Room) and the podcast Sulla razza (About Race), hosted by the same author together with Nathasha Fernando and Maria Catena Mancuso. She shows how these two texts challenge categories such as “mother tongue” and “native speaker” through narratives that expose the structural nature of racism and sexism and help redefine the concepts of “identity”, “belonging”, and “citizenship”. Gender oppression, ethnic identity, anti-Romani discrimination, and intergenerational conflict are investigated in Áine O’Healy’s analysis of two autobiographically inspired films by Romani film-maker Laura Halilovic, Io, la mia famiglia rom e Woody Allen (2009; Me, My Romani Family and Woody Allen) and Io rom romantica (2014; Me, a Romantic Romani Woman). Focusing on the tensions and aporias that emerge in the configuration of the central female character in both films, this article explores both the deeply rooted racism towards the Romani population in Italy and the patriarchal structure that characterizes the social organization of the Romani community. The Special Issue closes with Giulia Fabbri’s analysis of social media activism in the Italian context, where, over the past two years, Black Italians and Italians of Color have increasingly addressed issues of structural racism and sexism, the colonial past and its legacies, and intersectional violence. The author focuses on the digital activism of Djarah Kan, Oiza Queens Day Obasuyi, and Espérance Hakuzwimana Ripanti and analyses Facebook Live formats and Facebook and Instagram posts created by the three activists, emphasizing how social media can reconfigure the forms of cultural activism and increasingly constitute spaces where Black Italian women and Italian women of Color can develop anti-racist and anti-sexist intersectional practices and epistemologies.

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank all those who contributed to this Special Issue in different ways and in different roles: Djarah Kan and Leaticia Ouedraogo, for sharing their compelling reflections in the interviews; the contributors, for their hard work, commitment, and brilliance; and all our colleagues who put their competence and expertise at our disposal to meticulously review the articles. We would like to thank the editors of the Journal of Postcolonial Writing, Janet Wilson and Christopher Ringrose, for enthusiastically welcoming our project. Our warmest gratitude goes to the Special Issue editor Paul Veyret, for his continuous support and generous collaboration. Last but not least, we are deeply grateful to Francesco Gentile for allowing us to use his beautiful photograph for the front cover.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

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Notes on contributors

Caterina Romeo

Caterina Romeo is an Associate Professor at Sapienza University of Rome, where she teaches Literary Theory, Gender Studies, and Migrations Studies. She is the author of Interrupted Narratives and Intersectional Representations in Italian Postcolonial Literature (2022), Riscrivere la nazione (2018), and Narrative tra due sponde: Memoir di italiane d’America (2005). She has co-edited the volume Postcolonial Italy: Challenging National Homogeneity (2012), and a Special Issue of the journal Postcolonial Studies titled “Postcolonial Europe” (2015).

Giulia Fabbri

Giulia Fabbri has completed a postdoctoral fellowship in gender studies at Sapienza University of Rome, where in 2020 she obtained a PhD in gender studies. She is the author of Sguardi (post)coloniali. Razza, genere e politiche della visualità ([Post]colonial Gazes. Race, Gender, and the Politics of Visuality) (ombre corte 2021) and her research interests include gender and racial representations in visual culture, social media activism, and the cultural production of Italian women of African descent.

Notes

1. Although the authors conceived and developed this introduction jointly, Caterina Romeo wrote the section titled “Intersectional Italy: Preliminary considerations”, while Giulia Fabbri wrote the section titled “Structure and articles”.

2. Montanelli had bought a 12-year-old Eritrean girl from her father and later in life had repeatedly boasted about it, invoking cultural differences – or, rather, the lack of any culture in Africa – in order to justify his behavior that would have been considered unacceptable in Italy (Bisiach [1969] 2020; Biagi 1982).

3. Here and throughout this Special Issue, we have adopted the policy implemented by The New York Times and the Washington Post in 2020 to capitalize Black and Blackness (Coleman 2020; WashPostPR 2020), as “a recognition and acknowledgment not only of the cultural bonds and historical experiences shared by people of African heritage, but also the shared struggles of the descendants of enslaved people, families who immigrated generations ago and more recent immigrants from Africa, the Caribbean and other corners of the world” (WashPostPR 2020, para. 1). Unlike the Washington Post (and like The New York Times), we choose not to capitalize white, as it “has long been capitalized by hate groups” (Coleman 2020, para. 18) and “white supremacists have long favored the uppercase style, which in itself is reason to avoid it” (Baquet and Corbett 2020, para. 5).

4. We, the authors of this introduction and of two articles and editors of this Special Issue, consider our writing about race and processes of racialization as a way to expose racism, create awareness, contribute to the critical debate on these issues, and promote the work being produced in Italy by Black women and women of Color. As “white” women, we acknowledge that racism is not part of our everyday lived experiences – although sexism is – and therefore we do not claim to be theorizing as part of the racialized community; rather we consider ourselves as active allies of the racialized community in the fight against racism.