“La storia conta e pesa”: The ghosts of colonial past in Igiaba Scego's writings

Tatjana Babic Williams, Purdue University

Abstract

This study examines the ghostly remnants of Italian colonial past in the literary opus of the second-generation Somali-Italian woman author Igiaba Scego. I argue that Scego's texts, even when they do not directly foreground historical themes, still remain haunted by ghosts of the colonial past that Italy shares with its ex-colonies. I use the metaphor of haunting as elaborated by Avery Gordon in Ghostly Matters as an overarching analytical approach to Scego's opus. Gordon's idea of the "ghostly" as a "social invisible," or that which has been excluded, forgotten, and silenced by modern history provides the theoretical rationale for Chapter 1, where I discuss the status of colonial past in Italian cultural imaginary. I demonstrate how the Italian colonial involvement with Africa has been purposefully forgotten or embellished in the self-absolving myth of Italians as "good colonizers," and I contrast such historical evasiveness with Scego's piece "La storia conta e pesa," in which the author puts forward a compelling argument for re-learning of the received history as an antidote to colonial amnesia. In Chapters 2 and 3 I compare and contrast Scego's novels and short stories to F.T. Marinetti's Mafarka il futurista (1910), Ennio Flaiano's Tempo di uccidere (1947), and to a number of other texts and visual representations from the colonial period, in order to exemplify the various ways in which Scego's writings engage in re-learning of history, by challenging, countering, and rewriting the received colonial script about "what happened" in Italian Africa. Chapter 2 focuses on the analysis of recurrent tropes used in Italian colonial culture to symbolize the space of the colony and its inhabitants (such as the metaphor of Africa as anachronistic space, frontier, and the realm of the abject) and on the investigation of the rhetorical strategies devised to represent colonial violence (such as its aesthetization and erasure). I contrast these colonial narrative modes with literary strategies Scego adopts in her novels La nomade che amava Alfred Hitchcock and Oltre Babilonia. Chapter 3 closely examines images of colonized women and views on miscegenation in Italian cultural imaginary of the colonial and imperial eras, by tracing the literary and visual genealogy of the contradictory portrayal of colonized women as simultaneously hypersexual, available, repulsive, and diseased. I revisit Marinetti's and Flaiano's texts, now focusing on their portrayal of women and the feminine, and then analyze the representations of the colonized women in Scego's short story "Identità" and her novel Oltre Babilonia in relation and as a response to colonial imaginary. While Chapters 2 and 3 investigate Scego's corrective narrative interventions in the colonial past, Chapter 4 deals with the author's representations of Italian postcolonial present. Gordon's hypothesis that "social invisible" continues to haunt the ways we experience and interact with social reality in the present provides a productive approach for the interpretation of the postcolonial encounter currently taking place in Italy, a process that is marked by the resurfacing of the spectral colonial repertoire of stereotypes, images, and scripts through which Italian immigrants are perceived. While showing that, despite its seeming immateriality, haunting retains a markedly disabling power, my reading of Scego's novels Rhoda and Oltre Babilonia and her short story "Identità" in this chapter places a particular emphasis on the ways in which haunting can also yield a "transformative recognition" (Gordon), and become a strategy for healing, survival, resistance, and reinterpretation of the ghostly historical heritage into a "usable past" (Zamora). I argue that in inviting the Italian audience to re-learn their colonial past and own up to its ghosts, Scego's texts establish a framework for the ethical coexistence in the increasingly multiracial and intercultural Italian context.

Degree

Ph.D.

Advisors

Coda, Purdue University.

Subject Area

Comparative literature|Romance literature|European Studies

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