"Italiani brava gente" between past and present. Women's history and narrations in the colonial discourse

This book examines Italian colonial discourse and its afterlives in contemporary public debates on migration, citizenship and national identity. Moving from the colonial period to the present, it investigates how racialised and gendered representations of women’s bodies have contributed to the construction of Italian whiteness, colonial masculinity and the symbolic boundaries of national belonging. The central argument is that sexual violence functions, both historically and in the contemporary context, as a biopolitical and identity-making device through which colonial and postcolonial hierarchies are produced, legitimised and reactivated. Drawing on postcolonial studies, feminist theory and intersectionality, the book analyses the discursive and symbolic construction of colonised women’s bodies in Italian colonial culture, with particular attention to the relationship between race, gender, sexuality and domination. It then traces the reverberations of these imaginaries in contemporary Italy, especially from the 1990s to 2023, focusing on public, media and political narratives surrounding migration, security, sexual violence and citizenship. The analysis develops across multiple levels: public discourse, media representations, photographic imaginaries and normative production, both during the colonial phase and in the contemporary Italian context. By placing colonial visual and legal regimes in dialogue with present-day debates on migrants and racialised subjects, the book shows how the colonial archive continues to shape the ways in which gendered and racialised otherness is imagined, governed and excluded. In doing so, it contributes to Italian postcolonial studies by foregrounding sexual violence not as a marginal theme, but as a crucial site where colonial memory, national identity and contemporary racism intersect.