About

International conference

▸ Sapienza Università di Roma
Roma, 16-17 September 2021
▸ University of Warwick
Coventry, 1 October 2021

Italy’s colonial empire, small and relatively short-lived, extended into parts of East and North Africa, the Balkans and the Mediterranean Sea. A controversial project often wrongly associated solely with the Fascist Regime, it was quickly repressed from public debate after the war, in an effort to carry on and create a new Italy, cleansed from its past mistakes. A new discourse – a particularly successful one – was also crafted: Italians were good colonialists, they built streets and helped underdeveloped communities to become modern. Most of the traces that colonialism left in postwar culture are covered up by this misleading discourse, or they are simply invisible. However, in the 1960s this situation did not prevent, and perhaps even encouraged, the development of a strong internationalist solidarity toward decolonizing movements, which in cinema had its most famous outcome in the film The Battle of Algiers (Pontecorvo, 1966), an Italian-Algerian film seen and discussed by revolutionary and thirdworldist organizations, from the Black Panthers to Palestinian militants.

​

Several other films of the time, whether fiction films (like I dannati della terra, Orsini 1969, based on Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth) or non-fiction (Notes Towards an African Orestes, Pasolini, 1970) tackled colonial issues, but only as late as 1981 did a rarely seen colossal, Lion of the Desert (Akkad), openly talk about the Italian empire. Traces of past colonialism, Italian or not, can be found in several other films of the past 75 years, from an internationally acclaimed movie like Life is Beautiful (Benigni, 1997) to a domestic box-office hit such as Tolo tolo (Zalone, 2020), and from corporate films shot in former colonies to experimental films that openly criticize colonial practices. In our conference we will discuss Postcolonial Italian Cinema from its multiple points of view. While Italian colonial and empire cinema, thanks to the works of Ruth Ben Ghiat and others, has finally been analysed and discussed, still relatively little has been written on post-war films that dealt with colonialism, with the exception of a few scholars and works (such as those by Leonardo De Franceschi). And most importantly, these different contributions have not been synthesised’ into a coherent discourse. Our conference aims towards a reconsideration of Postcolonial Italian Cinema in film and history.

​

The Rome part of the conference will take place in person and will be livestreamed. The Warwick part will take place  in hybrid mode and will consist of a roundtable discussion.

​

Convenors: Damiano Garofalo (Sapienza, Rome) and Luca Peretti (Warwick)

Organizing committee: Samuel Antichi (Sapienza, Rome), Ilaria Dellisanti (Sapienza, Rome), Mary Jane Dempsey (Warwick/Cornell), Luana Fedele (Sapienza, Rome), Alma Mileto (Sapienza, Rome), Ilaria Puliti (Warwick).