Defying the Chromatic Norm. Strategies of Invisibility and Italian Transdiasporic Blackness

This essay presents a reflection on Italian blackness from a transdiasporic point of view, starting from the analysis of two memoirs by two women writers from the Italian diaspora: African Italian American writer Kym Ragusa’s The Skin Between Us (2008) and Somali Italian writer Igiaba Scego’s La mia casa è dove sono (2010). Outgoing and incoming migrations in different historical periods are read in continuity in order to illuminate central aspects of contemporary Italian culture, such as the construction of a collective identity which does not conform to the national “chromatic norm.” If Scego’s Blackness as a child is juxtaposed to the (presumed) whiteness of the Italian population, Italian migrants in the United States, claims Ragusa, were not considered quite white, but rather “white of a different color,” and such color was deemed a marker of subalternity. In the last part of the essay, I scrutinize how, by turning hypervisibility into a tool of resistance, aesthetic practices can be deployed as counterhegemonic practices which undermine the construction of “the” Italian national body and refuse to mimetically reproduce (presumed) national whiteness