Black (or) Italians? The Construction of Blackness in Italian Context - Past and Present

Black (or) Italians? The Construction of Blackness in the Italian Context – Past and Present. In the last 30 years Italy experienced relevant changes due to its new configuration as a postcolonial country and land of transnational migrations, without ceasing to be an emigration country. From the official end of Italian colonialism and, later, from the Berlin Wall fell, the seas around Italy no longer constitute insuperable barriers but rather borders that are continously crossed. The arrival, the transition or the stable settlement of people coming from the Global South, the daily deaths in the Mediterranean Sea, the increasing presence of the so-called “second generations of migration” and the consequent social and demographic changes force Italy to deal with its postcolonial and, as Cristina Lombardi-Diop proposed, postracial status. The new social balances created by migration flows and the increasingly presence of Afroitalians have two simultaneous effects: on one hand they are re-defining the concepts of “being Italian” and of national belonging; on the other hand they are revealing that the racial identity of the Italians has been built up as uniformly white, with the consequent foreclosure of people who are not included in this “chromatic norm”. In this paper I focus on the construction processes of blackness in the frame of Italian historical and geopolitical context. Connecting the postcolonial present with the colonial past, I examine how the definition of the concept of blackness has been influenced by specific social phenomena linked to specific historical periods (as colonialism, migrations etc). I analyze both the representations of blackness in today’s Italy and how the common idea that “black Italian” is an oxymoron is increasingly challenged by the “second generations”.