Il nero è vicino. Colonialismo e razzismo nell’atlante visuale dell’Italia repubblicana (“Epoca” 1950-1989)

This research examines the ways in which Italy has visualised itself as an imagined community in relation to its relationship with otherness — in colonial and racial terms — through the study of the Mondadori newsmagazine “Epoca”, identified by historiography as the “visual atlas” of republican Italy. On the basis of the study of the magazine’s entire published issues and considering both quantitative and qualitative evaluations, the periodisation of the analysis was defined: from 1950, the starting year of the Trust Territory of Somaliland and of the launch of the magazine, to 1989, a turning point both from a historiographical point of view and for the emergence of anti-racist sensitivities in Italy (and beyond). These evaluations allowed the identification of four case studies within the main mythological systems around which this specific identity imaginary was condensed: Italians as "good people", Italy as a non-racist country, Italy as an exporter of civilisation and, finally, that of Italians understood as a white nation. Although part of the study consisted in showing how these myths and the main stereotypes of colonial and racist origin have been re-adapted, the main aim was nevertheless to assess their processes of signification, the functions they have performed and the uses they have been put to. The aim was to try to understand what processes of stabilisation they had been the foundation of, and therefore what anxieties and concerns they had helped to shield, by interweaving the different seasons of the history of the memory of Italian colonialism with the practices of remembering in republican Italy and, more generally, with the political and cultural history of the long postwar period in Italy.