Can Black History Reframe Italian History? Race, Empire, and Historical Education

An Italian history textbook can acknowledge colonial violence while retaining a national narrative organized around Italian action. This article asks how Black History and selected concepts associated with Critical Race Theory can change that organization without imposing a United States chronology. It combines a documentary reading of the 2012 and 2025 national curricular guidance with an interpretive comparison of two published longitudinal studies: an analysis of 58 textbooks issued between 1936 and 2020 and a study of 42 images in 21 textbooks published between 1950 and 2022. Five dimensions structure the comparison: periodization, causal attribution, colonial violence, African agency, and visual perspective. Within the findings reported for these samples, greater acknowledgment of Italian aggression coexists with restricted African narrative agency. This asymmetric revision is a qualitative interpretation of two published datasets, not an estimate for Italian textbooks as a whole. The article proposes relational Black History as an analytical and curricular framework for reconstructing African and diasporic actors within the histories through which Italianness was made and contested. The framework examines how racial hierarchies and political belonging were formed and contested within the distinct historical settings of early modern enslavement, liberal imperialism, Fascist rule, and republican citizenship. The article translates this analysis into principles for curriculum design that reconsider inherited periodizations, clarify colonial responsibility, and place African actors and institutions within explanations of historical change.