California Italian Studies

The field of Black Italian studies encompasses a wide array of subfields, methodological approaches, and intellectuals. In this introduction, we advance a provisional definition, conceived not as a definitive or rigidly prescriptive formulation but rather as an opening intervention intended to stimulate further theoretical elaboration and critical engagement with this evolving field. Using an intentionally broad and porous definition that does not seek to impose labels, we understand Black Italia as an interdisciplinary field of study characterized by a set of intellectual, political, and artistic practices and approaches that broadly aim at (re)centering and excavating the Black presence in the Italian and Italian speaking contexts. This presence encompasses African, Afrodescendant and Afrodiasporic histories, experiences, and cultural and artistic productions that, despite their existence, have been historically overlooked and marginalized. 

This article presents a hitherto unexamined Italian Occupation-era sermon that highlights the relationship between the Italian colonial government in East Africa and a collaborationist faction of the Ethiopian Orthodox church. The text is a public prayer likely given by the Ethiopian Metropolitan of Aksum (or perhaps even the Nəburä əd [a clerical head]) in response to, and in support of, Italy’s declaration of war against Great Britain and France (June 10, 1940) on the outset of World War Two. The document consists of a short sermon (published bilingually in the original Amharic as well as in Italian translation) followed by a prayer, asking God to support Italy and the Italian Emperor (Vittorio Emanuele III) in its fight against France and Great Britain. It is an unequivocal piece of propaganda, issued by the Ufficio Diffusione Stampa dell’Impero, specifically by the Governo dell’Eritrea, Direzione del Personale e AA. GG., Sezione Studi, for the newspaper Corriere Eritreo (published on June 16). As such, while it is impossible to assess the text’s accuracy, the fact that the published version includes the original Amharic (incorporating  a number of Gəʿəz [Ancient Ethiopian, termed gheez in the Italian memo] words and phrases) would suggest it was composed by members of the EOTC (Ethiopian Orthodox Täwaḥədo Church) and then read by the elite clergy of Aksum (perhaps by the collaborationist metropolitan Yoḥannǝs I) and translated by the memo’s author, Gavino Gabriel. As I contend here, the existence of this sermon illustrates a profound localization of Italian rule by some elite clergy in the Ethiopian Orthodox Church. Indeed, as the text would seem to confirm, the some of the clergy of Aksum Ṣǝyon legitimated the Kingdom of Italy as they once did the Ethiopian Emperor.

In this article, I explore the work of Joy Nwosu, an ethnomusicologist, musician and film scholar, who in 1968 published Cinema e Africa nera: l’immagine dei neri nel cinema bianco e il primo cinema africano visti nel 1968 (Cinema and Black Africa: The Image of Black People in White Cinema and Early African Cinema as seen in 1968). I approach Nwosu’s study, now over fifty-five years removed from its original date of publication, in order to examine the work as an example of what scholar and activist bell hooks articulates as an “oppositional gaze,” or a critical viewing practice enacted by Black women spectators. Specifically, what would it mean to acknowledge Nwosu’s study as a foundational moment of postcolonial Italian Cinema Studies thus challenging the historiography of the field? I will first outline the sociopolitical contexts of Nwosu’s Cinema e Africa nera, including African decolonization and its reception in Italy. I then consider the study’s significance in relation to a body of scholarship on Italian cinema and media studies attendant to racial discourse and representation, most notably those produced within the last twenty years. I argue that Nwosu’s Cinema e Africa nera directs us to reconsider Italian film history proper, advancing a critical race and decolonial analysis prior to the formative emergence of these fields almost two decades later. 

By sketching out the theoretical contours of what Hal Foster terms a contemporary “archival impulse,” this essay highlights the analytical potential with regards to the coupling of archive and postcolonial literature in Italy. This focus leads to the examination of how the archive’s literary mediation with pastness enables new temporal trajectories, for which the recuperative impulse can also disturb normative historicist practices. In this essay, I will focus on the novel Timira : Romanzo Meticcio (2012) by Wu Ming 2 and Antar Mohamed and examine how its innovations in both narrative content and form generate essential potentialities for reframing the power relations between archive, fiction, and the political dimension of historicity. The approach adopted by both authors brings real-life details closer to literary invention and immerses fictions within concrete and factual objects, thus creating a new literary form that allows the emergence of new epistemological arrangements alternative to current trends in postcolonial criticism. In this novel, imaginaries of incompletion, fragmentation, and rhizome allude to the disruption of a past-present temporal continuum and transform the post- as a contested site pointing to a new process of becoming . Speaking directly about the function of the archive allows us to consider how the hermeneutic malleability between narrative and history intervenes critically in Italy’s current narratological ambition to imagine a postcolonial “now.” Additionally, I suggest that Timira ’s aesthetic potential pertains to an emerging cultural shift in Italy where the traditional (violent) mode of looking-backward and moving-forward has been giving way to accommodating alternative critiques of time, inviting us to reflect on the generative power of future-thinking.

This article explores the history of Black musicians at the Sanremo Music Festival during the 1960s, as the festival sought to reach international markets and bolster Italy’s recording and publishing industries. Over that decade, artists including Louis Armstrong, Dionne Warwick, Wilson Pickett, Shirley Bassey, and Eartha Kitt performed at Sanremo, raising critical questions about the festival’s role as a cultural venue where racial categories and hierarchies in Italy are constructed and negotiated. Drawing on musicological analysis and archives of some of Italy’s most prominent newspapers and magazines (La Stampa, Corriere della Sera, Radiocorriere TV, and others), this article argues that the Italian public theorized a Black musicality distinct from a (white) Italian musical aesthetic. The dual performances of canzone italiana (Italian song) that characterized the festival during much of the 1960s enabled these comparisons, as performances translated songs not only linguistically but also culturally and racially. Journalists often wrote about the Black musicians in ways that highlighted their Blackness and their difference musically, visually, and, as it concerned Black women, sexually, invoking the colonial trope of the Venere nera (Black Venus). Ultimately, by examining this foundational period, the article demonstrates how Sanremo provided a public space to negotiate questions of race, belonging, and italianità (Italianness), indirectly engaging with Italy’s often overlooked history of colonialism and Fascism. The article concludes by linking the legacy of these artists to the cultural politics of Black Italian music today.

This paper examines the racialized construction of the false bride figure in “The Three Oranges” folktale tradition, tracing its iterations from Giambattista Basile’s “I tre cedri” (1634, “The Three Citrons”) through Carlo Gozzi’s eighteenth-century theatrical adaptations. Focusing on tale type 408, this study argues that the figure of the dark-skinned, enslaved false bride functions as a strategic narrative device that encodes racial, religious, and social hierarchies. Drawing on Geraldine Heng’s framework of race as a structural mechanism for organizing human difference, this analysis explores how the racialization of the antagonist reinforces the moral legitimacy of the fair-skinned, rightful bride, aligning whiteness with virtue and Blackness with deception and disorder. While Basile’s tale embeds racialized metaphors within early modern Neapolitan society’s Mediterranean context, Gozzi’s L’amore delle tre melarance (The Love of Three Oranges) partially retains these tropes, reconfiguring the false bride as a Turkish servant within commedia dell’arte conventions. However, Gozzi’s L’augellino belverde (The Green Bird) departs from this racial logic by erasing explicit markers of race, suggesting a shift in thematic priorities rather than a direct engagement with racial discourse. This erasure, however, does not negate the foundational role of racial logic in the folktale’s structure. By comparing these adaptations, this paper demonstrates how racial narratives in European folklore persist, evolve, and, at times, disappear, revealing the fluidity of race as both a literary and ideological construct. Ultimately, this study situates “The Three Oranges” within the broader framework of premodern racial thought, arguing that these narratives actively participate in the historical construction of race and alterity in European storytelling.

Analyzing two ENI documentaries from the 1960s, Oduroh (1964) and Uomini del petrolio (1965, Oilmen), this article considers the historical and contemporary logics shaping Italy’s extractive relationship with Africa. Framed by the recent revival of Enrico Mattei’s legacy in Giorgia Meloni’s government current “Mattei Plan for Africa,” the essay reads these corporate films as crucial interscalar devices. The films reveal ENI’s strategy of using developmentalist narratives and specific visual representations to naturalize its largescale interventions. Oduroh shows the making of African subjects suitable for extractive work, while Uomini del petrolio documents the physical reshaping of African landscapes for resource exploitation. Together, these films exemplify what the paper identifies as the dual processes of cultural and material transformation necessary for establishing extractive operations in Africa. The article contributes to discussions of petro-modernity, the African Anthropocene, and racial capitalism by showing how ENI’s simultaneous construction of extractive infrastructure and developmentalist narratives produced new ways of imagining Africa’s territories and futures.

This essay examines how translation shapes Black Italian cultural politics, focusing on the circulation of Black feminist thought in translation as both linguistic transfer and political praxis. Central to the analysis is translator and activist Marie Moïse, whose translations and workshops foreground Black Italian voices and connect transnational Black feminist theory to local struggles. The essay also considers the “boomerang effect” of translation through Rahma Nur, whose recognition in Italy was mediated by the circulation of her work abroad. Drawing on Spivak, Venuti, and Edwards, it argues that translation is dialogic and recursive: it enables visibility, exposes structural inequalities, and opens space for Black Italian feminists to articulate positionality, critique erasure, and foster transnational solidarity.

This article examines the socially conscious creations of Black “boogeymen” by two artists of widespread appeal and noteworthy success: African American actor, writer, producer, and rapper Donald Glover, and second-generation Italian rapper of Tunisian parents, Ghali. Contributing to ongoing conversations sparked by Afropessimists and Afrofuturists, I aim to show that Glover’s and Ghali’s respective artistic interventions recenter the historically dismissed Black presence in history and culture in the U.S. and Italy from the perspective of Black men. First, an analysis of song lyrics and audiovisual elements in both artists’ versions of “Boogieman” elucidates a shared Afropessimistic impulse imploring the listener to acknowledge and confront the structures of racism that have shaped negative perceptions of Black communities, particularly Black men. Next, through observations of the Afrofuturistic elements experimented with by Glover and Ghali, I illustrate the performers’ active and imaginative (re)creations of the “boogeyman” legend,  through a Black cultural lens. I close this article by sharing additional examples of Ghali’s recent and ongoing contributions to the Afrofuturism movement in Italy and beyond, underscoring his role in expanding its reach and resonance across diasporic contexts.

These field notes—in contrast to a typical journal article—employ a creative structure and approach to explore the goals and activities of a new humanities lab. The notes begin by remembering the tragic death of a young migrant agricultural worker in the Agro Pontino region of Italy, Mr. Satnam Singh. This untimely loss of life is then contextualized within the contemporary phenomenon of “dunki” migration from India to the Global North and read through the notion of “the Cybercene”—a transformational ecocultural sub-era of the Anthropocene. Via the theoretical lens of the relatively new field of multispecies humanities, the Agro Pontino is shown to be an ecocultural space replete with colonial-Cybercene multispecies, multi-kind and multi-era co-becomings. The second section briefly describes two more projects to illustrate the lab’s four basic theoretical premises: namely, i) the analysis of natureculture, ii) the use of situated decolonial epistemologies, iii) the search for a material turn, and iv) delimiting anthropocentricity. These foundational premises, newly developed methods such as “multispecies thick-mapping,”  “naturalcultural discourse analysis” and the use of the Cybercene as an ecocultural rather than a techno-scientific organizational principle are offered as exciting avenues for future analyses of profoundly entangled naturalcultural identities and multispecies affects, interests and destinies. 

What are the risks of falling prey to protagonisms within the realm of cultural organization and curation? How might we reflect upon the work that we engage in as not aligned with the modes and motivations of cultural institutions around us? What does it mean for the objectives of shifting culture and society to be unaligned with those divisive factors that keep us focused on obtaining those few resources available in exchange for notions of integration into a system that has done little to demonstrate a care for what we represent? I have often reflected upon the notion of collectivity within curatorial practice and the ways in which the shifting away from the individual, the opacity provided by collective gestures, force institutions to have to dismantle those assignments of value that leave space for only those “chosen” to enter.