Album of Count Pompeo Campello, Turkish Cannons, Tripoli 1912
The exhibit In Africa it is Another Story: Looking Back at Italian Colonialism opening
on April 4, 2014, in Pusey Library has been curated by Professor Giuliana Minghelli and
Italian Doctoral candidates Matthew Collins, Dalila Colucci, Eloisa Morra and Chiara
Trebaiocchi and Carol Johnson Neuman.
Featuring personal albums, photographs, postcards, and maps from the early twentieth
century to the Fascist period from a rich trove of Harvard Collections, the exhibit
investigates the visual, literary and political imaginary that prepared and accompanied
Italy’s belated and violent participation in the colonial “scramble for Africa.” As
suggested by the title, the exhibit explores how colonial ideology relies on a notion of
Africa as an exceptional territory, beyond legality, even reality. The notion that “in Africa
it is another story” validates both the nineteenth century exoticizing fantasies and the
violence of the twentieth century Italian colonial wars. At the same time, the images,
words and voices presented in the exhibit remind the postcolonial viewer that the “story”
of “Africa” was and is multiple and different.
The exhibit is organized around four themes: exploratory missions; colonial war;
containment of the colonial other through photography; and the materialization of
colonial dominion through construction projects and urban planning. The archival
materials are put into dynamic dialogue with contrasting perspectives from literature and
popular culture, as well as voices of contemporary participants, both perpetrators and
victims of the Italian colonial adventure. One aim of the exhibit is to redress the ongoing
silence and historical erasure that afflicts this still hidden chapter of Italian history.
The Expedition of the “Staffetta”and the Italian Imaginary of Africa
The hydrographic expedition of the ship “La Staffetta” from Port Said to Zanzibar
between 1907 and 1909 is recorded in two photographic albums that open the exhibition.
The Staffetta’s journey ambiguously combines scientific and diplomatic missions, a
covert military operation with tourism. History and fantasy blur in these photographs.
The exhibit highlights how the images of this historical expedition strongly resonate with
the contemporary exotic imaginary of Emilio Salgari’s nineteenth century adventure
novels, as well as with the world of twentieth century cartoonist Hugo Pratt. While at
times playful and fanciful, the photographs reveal the predatory nature of the European
presence in Africa. In a similar way, the display shows the historical violence behind the
fictional world of adventure stories. As a journalist, Emilio Salgari was an early
supporter of an Italian military invasion of Libya, and Hugo Pratt was first introduced to
the world of adventure as a child-soldier, who in 1936 followed his father in Mussolini’s
invasion of Ethiopia. As if to avoid a direct confrontation with the Italian colonial
experience, both artists generally preferred to feature foreign heroes, and to steer away
from the African continent as a primary setting for their tales.
The Italo-Turkish War: Propaganda’s Words, Images and Sounds
The second section focuses on the 1912-1913 Italo-Turkish War in Libya. Following the
Italian defeat at Adwa in 1896, this was Italy major attempt at colonial expansion. The
attack on the Ottoman Empire was a military operation far beyond most other European
military interventions on the African continent, and one only matched by Mussolini’s
1936 invasion of Ethiopia. The 1912 war also saw the unleashing of a massive
propaganda apparatus, and the materials presented here reconstruct how the war was
narrated through the press, songs, postcards, photo albums and literary manifestos. These
include: a series of commemorative cards produced by a Spanish chocolate factory;
propagandistic postcards ; and the photographic albums of General Caneva, commander
of the armed forces in Libya, Count Pompeo Campello, a Roman nobleman, professional
photographer and army officer, and Angelo Cormanni, a rank-and-file soldier working as
a telegrapher. If government and nationalist media depicted a short and glorious conflict,
combining a mission of civilization with easy land appropriation, the photographs reveal
a more complex reality giving us a glimpse of untold stories of the war and confirming
that in Africa it is indeed another story.
Woman and Land: Representations of the Other in Italian Colonial Postcards
A collection of 1930s postcards depicting women from Lybia, Somalia and Eritrea is
accompanied by a video of TV interviews, songs, and readings by contemporary ItaloEthiopian storyteller and musician Gabriella Ghermandi. The postcards highlight the
pseudo-ethnographic and exoticizing representation of the colonial other sponsored by
the Fascist regime. The predatory gaze that organizes these images is dissected using
quotes from Ennio Flaiano’s 1947 novel Tempo di uccidere the story of the encounter of
an Italian officer with an Ethiopian woman. Territorial and sexual conquest are candidly
conflated in Faccetta nera (Little black face), the popular song composed in occasion of
the Abyssinian war. The video of an interview with the famous journalist and opinion
maker Indro Montanelli in which he reminisces about his twelve-year-old Eritrean “wife”
is a further eloquent illustration of the unexamined mark left on Italian consciousness by
Fascist racism, and how, after the colonial debacle, the domination of women continued
to play a compensatory role in male collective memory. If, ultimately the women
depicted in the postcards are surrounded by a silence impossible to reconstruct, the
exhibit uses the power of photography to break the frame of the colonial gaze, allowing
their dignity and individuality to emerge as an urgent interrogation. Ghermandi’s story
of the children born from the colonial encounter lends a voice to these nameless women
and builds a collective memory both for the colonized populations and the Italians who
have never critically faced their history.
Building the Empire in Tripoli: Fascist Architecture between Roman Ruins and
Arab Skyline
The final section of the exhibit explores Fascist architecture and planning in Tripoli as an
ambiguous site where the Italian conquest and colonial imaginary confronts vernacular
resilience. Through postcards and maps, ranging from the 1912 war against the Ottoman
Empire to the 1930s Fascist administration, the display investigates the contamination
between different architectural languages and traditions in the Fascist architectural
interventions. The first important term of reference is the historical presence of the
Roman Empire in North Africa. The archeological study and excavations of Roman
sites, such as Leptis Magna, Benghazi and Misurata, lend validity to the cultural and
political claims invoked both by liberal and Fascist Italy to support the colonial
occupation. As a result, the Roman architecture represented an important point of
reference for the Fascist imperial and architectural imaginary. The exhibit shows how in
Tripoli the Fascist buildings displayed along with the Roman past elements of the
existing Islamic architecture. Finally, what emerges in the architectural intervention in
Tripoli is Fascism ambiguous politics of repression and opening towards the Muslim
population. The regime built huge concentrations camps and built mosques. In 1937
during his visit to Libya, Mussolini declared himself protector of Islam.
The exhibit is intended for Harvard students and faculty, as well as members of the
Italian, Ethiopian, Eritrean, Libyan and Somali communities in the Boston area. The
materials and the stories on display in the Pusey Library in April will be presented in
May at the American Association of Italian Studies Conference in Zurich. Further, we
are planning to print a catalogue and create a permanent version of the exhibit online.
This is the first time, either in North America or Italy, that Italian colonialism is explored
from its nineteenth century exploratory and imaginary inceptions to Mussolini’s empire
in an a display of previously unseen materials.