<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">

<p>This article analyses the transatlantic influence of colonialist discourse regarding Italian colonial wars in East Africa, by focusing on literary texts. In the emerging Italian American literature, two works by key authors reflected on the impact of colonialist propaganda in the Italian America. Emanuel Carnevali’s ‘Tale One’ (1919) centers on his aunt’s experience in Eritrea around the time of the battle of Adwa (1896). The analysis of these two texts, which rewrote and challenged the central elements of nationalist propaganda, offers a unique chance to understand the complex relationship between nationalist discourse and diasporic communities, in a textual form—migrant literature—that by definition re-uses and combines elements from different cultural spaces to make sense of the experience of displacement.</p>
</abstract>

This article analyses the transatlantic influence of colonialist discourse regarding Italian colonial wars in East Africa, by focusing on literary texts. In the emerging Italian American literature, two works by key authors reflected on the impact of colonialist propaganda in the Italian America. Emanuel Carnevali’s ‘Tale One’ (1919) centers on his aunt’s experience in Eritrea around the time of the battle of Adwa (1896). The analysis of these two texts, which rewrote and challenged the central elements of nationalist propaganda, offers a unique chance to understand the complex relationship between nationalist discourse and diasporic communities, in a textual form—migrant literature—that by definition re-uses and combines elements from different cultural spaces to make sense of the experience of displacement.

‘White queens’ and ‘Nubian fiends’: Early Italian American fiction and the problem of colonialism

Borderlands Journal

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

This article analyses the transatlantic influence of colonialist discourse regarding Italian colonial wars in East Africa, by focusing on literary texts. In...

‘White queens’ and ‘Nubian fiends’: Early Italian American fiction and the problem of colonialism

Published Online: Apr 30, 2020

Page range: 39 - 63

DOI: https://doi.org/10.21307/borderlands-2019-003

Keywords
fiction, Italian American, colonialism, nationalism, migrants

© 2019 Andrea Ciribuco et al., published by Sciendo

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

‘White queens’ and ‘Nubian fiends’: Early Italian American fiction and the problem of colonialism

Published Online: Apr 30, 2020

Page range: 39 - 63

DOI: https://doi.org/10.21307/borderlands-2019-003

Keywordsfiction, Italian American, colonialism, nationalism, migrants

© 2019 Andrea Ciribuco et al., published by Sciendo

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Keywords
fiction, Italian American, colonialism, nationalism, migrants