20th Century Italian Literature Research Papers (original) (raw)

The life and works of writer and filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922-75) are dotted with references to Africa, Africans, and their diaspora, starting from 1958 until his death in 1975. His constructions and representations of Africa and Africans were multifaceted and had numerous intellectual, political, poetic, erotic, aesthetic, and autobiographical goals and nuances. However, Pasolini's "African gaze" in its entirety is deeply connected to his wider approach to alterity, subalternity, the South, and-as I will explain- to his construction of the "Pan-South" (Panmeridione) running through his work. This chapter will first identify the tools-both national (including the centrality of the dualistic theorization of Italy's Southern Question) and transnationalthrough which Pasolini's multifaceted Africa was conceived, and will then focus on his representations of the Horn of Africa. Even though Pasolini's Africa was influenced by Marxist, Pan-Africanist, anticolonialist, Gramscian, and post-Gramscian discourses, it was also much affected by Italy's self-representations and the construction of a "Mediterranean Africa" that emerged during Italian colonialism, both before and during Fascism. This is particularly evident in Pasolini's Eritrean texts, which, between 1968 and the mid-1970s, openly referred to Eritrea and the Eritreans as a former Italian colony and a colonized people. Literary representations of Italian East Africa were very rare in Italy after World War II, with Ennio Flaiano's 1947 novel Tempo di uccidere (A Time to Kill), set in the Horn of Africa in the mid-1930s during Italy's military campaign in Ethiopia, representing a great exception. Pasolini is the author who, after Italy's loss of its African colonies, most continuously and significantly approached Italian colonialism in the Horn of Africa. His Eritrean texts, despite their being difficult and disturbing, provide unique and precious tools to retrace and rewrite the underlying continuity between prefascist colonialism, Fascism, and postcolonial representations of Italian colonial Africa.