Race in Post-Fascist Italy

'War Children' and the Color of the Nation

Silvana Patriarca

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781108845908
• eBook ISBN: 9781108998147
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

Focusing on the experiences and representations of the 'brown babies' born at the end of World War Two from the encounters between Black Allied soldiers and Italian women, this book explores the persistence of racial thinking and racism in post-fascist and postcolonial Italy. Through the use of a large variety of historical sources, including personal testimonies and the cinema, Silvana Patriarca illustrates Italian – and also American – responses to what many considered a 'problem'. She sensitively analyses the perceptions of race/color among different actors, such as state and local authorities, Catholic clerics, filmmakers, geneticists, psychologists, and ordinary people, and her book is rich in detail about their impact on the lives of the children. Uncovering the pervasiveness of anti-Black prejudice in the early democratic republic, as well as the presence and limitations of anti-racist sensibilities, Race in Post-Fascist Italy allows us to better understand Italy's conflicted reaction to its growing diversity.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 “Undesirables”: Foreigners and Women in the Postwar
• 2 Little Aliens: Representing the “Mulattini”
• 3 “Not Only a Question of Humanity”: Assisting the “Mulattini”
• 4 Growing Up Black in Postwar Italy
• 5 On the Other Side of the Atlantic
• 6 Under “Expert” Eyes
• 7 Black Italians on the Screen: Two Films of the 1960s
• Interlude: A Story from a Calabrian Village
• 8 Ancestries and Identities
• Epilogue
• Select Bibliography
• Index