My study focuses on the white, female experience and memory of Italian colonialism through the reading of private, unpublished sources––memoirs, autobiographies, journals, oral memories––compared to the analysis of how colonial memory has been shaped in literary and cinematic works produced by Italian women in postcolonial times. I ask if applying the lenses of class, gender and regional belonging will question the accepted notion that Italian colonialism has been repressed and not properly addressed in the Italian public sphere, while raising questions about gendered memory and the role and agency of white women in the Empire-building project and its legacy. I look at how Italian women have represented and memorialized Italian colonialism, and to what extent they have taken part in the construction of the myth of Italiani brava gente (Italians good folks) through the analysis of novels, films and a vast collection of private writings. The exploration of such documents––journals, memoirs and autobiographies––required a long work of archival research in Italy that has eventually allowed me to include the often-neglected voices of lower-middle-class and working-class white Italian women in order to sketch an overarching assessment of white women’s participation in the colonial venture. My dissertation applies an intersectional perspective to (post)colonial hierarchies, showing how in the colonial setting race prevailed over gender affiliations, creating a complex web of power unbalances complicated by class and regional differences. The first chapter, Mal D’Africa, shows the perdurance of colonial clichés, and the extensive nostalgic romanticization of Africa in contemporary memoirs and literary production that has contributed to crystallize an edulcorated acritical representation of colonialism and the systematic objectification of Africans. The second chapter, The Others, delves deeply into the analysis of the dynamics between race, gender and class and how women negotiated the problematic contours and limits of their white privilege in the daily encounter with alterity within a virility-obsessed, patriarchal regime. The third and last chapter, Empowerment, shows how eventually the colony offered white women a space for economic, class or political empowerment and agency that was lacking in metropolitan Italy. This flashes up how problematically it was the very complicity with colonial ideology that created the conditions for niches of female emancipation at the detriment of the colonial other.
