The fiction of colorblind Italy and Orio Vergani's Io, povero negro (1929)

Abstract

Taking aim at the myth that il razzismo non esiste in Italy, this article explores the rhetorical mechanisms that underpin anti-black racism vis-à-vis Italian colonial fiction—fictions that give life to the deceit that Italy is colorblind. It focuses attention on the work of Orio Vergani (1898-1960) who was one of the most prolific documentarians of Italian East Africa. His reportage established a vast image repository of exoticized, black bodies that reinforced prevailing colonial stereotypes about Africa in the Italian cultural imagination during the early-20th century. Yet his novel, Io, povero negro (1929)—claimed to be Italy's first with a black protagonist—was written before Vergani ever set foot in Africa. The text presents a formulation of blackness conceived of obliquely, in the absence of Italy, and belonging to an elsewhere, that is, between an unnamed colony in Africa, France, and the United States. In so doing, it advances a rhetoric of race defined by absence, blockage, and deflection that was conceived transnationally, which, in turn, helps to set the conditions for both the denial and naturalization of racism in Italy today.