Beyond Amnesia and Colonialisms: Re / Writing the Past to forge new Italian Identities and Literatures

Abstract

In a sort of global national amnesia, Italy buried colonialism with the end of Fascism and subsequently World War Two, caught in the enthusiasm of Liberation and engaged in the difficult task of reconstruction. More recently, however, the brief history of Imperial Italy has surfaced in critical analyses to reveal that Italian colonialism was just as brutal as other colonialisms. Unlike older colonial powers, Italy has only recently begun to deal with its colonial legacies. This process - of acknowledgement and exploration of colonial memories – spurred by the waves of immigration into Italy, from the 1970s onwards, enacted also through the voices of second generation writers of migrant extraction, many born in Italy, has seen literary practice become a major site of remembrance and reclaim, individual, communitarian and societal. Through the writers considered, Italian Ethiopian Gabriella Ghermandi and Italian Somali Igiaba Scego and their characters, literature, and the cultural activities surrounding it, becomes a practice that denies oblivion. Driven by a desire of self-transformation, as well as decolonisation (Gnisci, 2004) of history and societal change, these postcolonial protagonists of Italian literature, work through traumatic experience critically, with oral and written narrations. Their trajectories beyond Babylon (Carroli, 2010) are analysed through Rosi Braidotti’s 1994 figuration of nomadic subjectivity, with reference to Errl and Rigney (2006) cultural memory framework.