Women, postcolonialism and italianità: exploring female subaltern voices in 21st century Italian literature (post-2010)

This thesis explores the role of marginalised female voices in literary texts in the debate surrounding Italy’s relationship with its colonial past, and how attitudes towards Italian colonialism impact conceptualisations of Italian identity today. The project focuses on a range of both fictional and autobiographical texts, namely Igiaba Scego’s Adua (2015), Francesca Melandri’s Sangue giusto (2017), Vittorio Longhi’s Il colore del nome (2021), and a selection of short stories and essays from Future: il domani narrato dalle voci di oggi (2019), a collection penned by a group of Afro-Italian women and curated by Scego. By entering the texts into a dialogue with each other and postcolonial literary theories, this thesis argues that the chosen texts attempt to combat Italian postcolonial amnesia by highlighting marginalised female voices that reveal suppressed and altered memories of Italy’s colonial past. In doing so, the texts challenge traditional ideas of Italian identity by emphasising the significance of Italy’s complex relationship with Africa, revealing names to be a significant marker of this relationship, as well as highlighting the increasing militancy of the youngest generation of Afro-Italian writers in dealing with Italy’s colonial history and its impact on black Italians today. The project also argues that while colonial-era marginalised female voices are ultimately lost to history and cannot speak for themselves, drawing upon Spivak’s conclusion that the subaltern “cannot speak” (1988), twenty-first century writers are able to keep their memory alive through these texts, allowing them to be included in the conversation regarding the ongoing legacy of Italian colonialism.