California Italian Studies

Following a visual trajectory that begins in the mid-1930s, this article discusses advertising for cleaning products in order to trace the peculiar formation of the idea of hygiene and its ideological ties to the larger, more subliminal project of the consolidation of Italian racial identity as uniformly and permanently white. The author contends that the peculiar ubiquity of whiteness - simultaneously expansive yet fixed – was carried forth, among other things, through a project of “redemptive hygiene” that was, in turn, mediated by the influence of Fascist racialist models and reflected in the postwar culture of advertising, also in virtue of the expansion of new technologies in support of a mass-mediated national culture. After considering Gino Boccasile’s propaganda and commercial posters and a key example (the Calimero ad for AVA) from the 1960s, the article concentrates on the 2006-2007 advertising campaign by the multinational company Guaber for one of their brands, Coloreria Italiana. This last example shows how the racialization of the space of the domestic plays with the ambiguous turn of the post-racial in contemporary Italy, where race is unhinged from a familiar ground in order to appear, be consumed, and be washed away.