Italy and Postcolonial Studies

Italy is certainly a postcolonial country. First, because, like most European countries, Italy has a past as a colonial nation. And colonial discourse even in Italy has played a central role in constructing the national identity, from the post-unification period onwards. Second, because since the late 1970s it has become the destination or transit area for significant transnational migratory movements. Finally, Italy is a postcolonial country because it is an active participant in the neo-imperialist attempt by the United States and its allies to recolonize Afghanistan and Iraq. Given these premises, some explanation is certainly due of the scanty (and late) development of postcolonial studies on the Italian intellectual scene. This essay has the aim of tracing some of the most significant elements that have conditioned the reception and development of postcolonial studies in Italy. My thesis is that an understanding of this process should take into account themes and arguments such as: the almost complete removal of the Italian colonial past from the collective national memory and from the public sphere, historical revisionism and the climate of ‘national reconciliation’ that has enveloped the country from the end of the Cold War, the so-called ‘political reflux’ that has characterized the Italian intellectual scene from the 1980s onwards, the conservatism and permanent immobility that governs the Italian system of university recruitment, the Italian debate about postmodernism and post-structuralism, the almost total indifference in Italy to Edward Said's work, and finally the absence of diasporic and migrant intellectuals at the key points of cultural and knowledge production. I conclude the essay by arguing that one of the main Italian routes to postcolonialism is to be found in political, cultural, militant and para-university areas of society that are contiguous with those of the new social movements.