California Italian Studies

In this essay, I examine the ways in which Anna Messina’s and Fausta Cialente’s narratives set in Alexandria, Egypt in the interwar period suggest conflicting representations of Italian identity. Relying on the notion of resistance and the different ways to exist/resist in the porous context of the city, I propose that Messina’s Cronache del Nilo recreates a monolithic, idealized vision of the Italian identity within Alexandria’s international community. Her characters strenuously oppose any form of relation and contamination in the name of aesthetic, racial, and national superiority nourished by Fascist ideologies. On the other hand, Cialente’s Ballata levantina represents more complex and hybrid subjectivities that rebel against the homogenization imposed by Fascist propaganda in the colonial settings.