DecolonItaly : decolonization and national identity in post-war Italy, 1945-1960

This dissertation examines the cultural results of Italian decolonization in the process of national reconstruction which followed WWII (1945-60). It dialogues with recent scholarship investigating colonial legacies in modern Italy, although it presents some innovative insights concerning both the methodology adopted to dissect the formation of those legacies and the corpus of representations that will be considered. As far as the first element is concerned, this thesis will define a critical approach enabling the exploration of the ways in which film contents offered a renewed sense of national belonging - or Italianità. Not only does this work shed new light on the transition from Fascism to the Republic according to critical and postcolonial perspectives (chapter 1), but it will offer a systematic examination of a film corpus that has almost been neglected by previous scholarship, that is newsreels and documentaries about the Italian former colonies produced between the 1945 and the 1960. The political interferences which characterised the production of that footage will be dissected thanks to the study of original archival findings combined with the review of scholarship on the topic (chapter 2). The analytical chapters will tackle the extent to which the memory of the colonial past was either repressed or selectively recollected in order to redefine the discursive geography of national belongings (chapter 3) and the intrinsic benevolence of Italians working abroad (chapter 4). The following chapters will deal more specifically with the formation of an aphasic and a-grammatic form of postcolonial memory (chapter 5), and with the resilient ways through which uncomfortable recollections of that past were re-articulated in a new and positive presence of Italy in Africa (chapter 6). In so doing, this work suggests that the ambiguous connection between de-Fascistization and decolonization engendered unproblematized narratives and memories about the colonial period that reverberate in contemporary Italian society.