the italianist 29 · 2009 · 175-198
‘[Non] è una somala’: Deconstructing African
femininity in Italian film
Áine O’Healy
In a recent, path-breaking essay, Derek Duncan argues that the many recent Italian
films which address the issue of immigration should be critically examined in terms
of how they racialize the non-Italian subject. An analysis of this kind would cast
light on the ways in which the representational practices of several contemporary
filmmakers are ‘embedded in complex histories of Italian colonialism and
emigration’.1 While Duncan focuses on the strategies through which the discursive
racialization of putatively ‘white’ immigrants is achieved (with specific reference
to Albanians), in this article I wish to turn my attention to the ways in which
contemporary Italian cinema constructs the figure of the black female migrant.
Although it may seem that the racial identity of African characters is ‘naturally’
visible and self evident, I argue that this is not the case, for the construction of
blackness is a complex process within each national context, drawing on specific
discursive conventions, traditions and histories. In approaching the representation
of African women available in recent Italian films, I wish to take into account not
only the issue of Italy’s colonial legacy and current, politically fraught attitudes
toward immigration, but also the contrasting articulations of black femininity
found in a variety of Italian media practices from the fascist era to the present.
My interest in this topic was prompted by a short, pivotal sequence that
occurs in the concluding section of Io, l’altro (2006), the first feature film directed
by Mohsen Melliti, a Tunisian immigrant to Italy. Here, two desperate fishermen,
one Sicilian and the other Tunisian, are cast adrift in the Strait of Sicily where
they unexpectedly snag the lifeless body of an African woman in their net and
haul it aboard the fishing boat. The unexpected irruption of the woman’s corpse,
unmarked by the slightest trace of decomposition – more than half way through a
film where female figures are otherwise absent – has a startling visual impact. As
the men scrutinize the dead woman’s face, which is presented in close up, Yousef,
the Tunisian, immediately declares, ‘È una Somala’. He then offers the hypothesis
that she was thrown overboard by smugglers during a clandestine journey to
Italy. Though both men express sadness regarding the woman’s tragic end, and
each utters a prayer on her behalf, the presence of her body on board the trawler
functions as a dead weight that crushes the fragile trust they had begun to rebuild
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in each other after a bitter, earlier conflict. Revolving around the retrieval and
contested disposal of the corpse, the sequence is focalized for the most part by
the paranoid Italian protagonist, Giuseppe, and shot through with hallucinatory
overtones.
What is especially disturbing about the presence of the body in the film’s
diegesis is its uncanny status as subject/non-subject. Though clearly a victim of
drowning, the woman appears to be merely sleeping. The fact that she is wearing
the traditional Islamic pendant known as the Hand of Fatimah signals to Yousef
that she is a Muslim, and prompts him to recite an Islamic prayer. Yet he soon
expresses a desire to return her body to the sea, rather than risk aggravating his
own status as a (falsely) suspected terrorist in the eventuality of being rescued by
the Italian Coast Guard. Finding a photograph of a child pinned to the woman’s
clothing, however, Giuseppe interprets this discovery as evidence of a mother’s
need to communicate with her child, or, at the very least, to let it know of her
ultimate fate at sea. For this reason, he insists on keeping the body on board. The
struggle between the men over the imagined needs of the dead woman creates an
irrevocable wedge between them, leading to the film’s tragic denouement.
The entire sequence invites multiple interpretive possibilities that remain wide
open at the film’s conclusion. Its most memorable moment, however, is the initial,
ghostly irruption of the dead woman in the mise en scène, where she functions as
something akin to a revenant from another time and place. In Spectres of Marx,
Jacques Derrida famously argued that the distinction between past, present and
future cannot be neatly drawn. Pointing to a link between the corporeal and the
spectral, he claims that vestigial elements of the past perpetually haunt the present.
His reflections on Hamlet lead him to assert that, when summoned up in the
consciousness of those who see them, these ghostly elements function as casualties
of histories at risk of being obliterated. Derrida speaks of the ethical necessity of
engaging with these spectres by acknowledging them or mourning them in order
to break the historical cycle of vengeance and retribution.2
The notion of spectrality also resonates with a particular emphasis in
postcolonial theorizing, which stresses the need to examine occluded colonial
history through a coming to terms with the traces of a nation’s colonial heritage.
Postcolonial theorists have focused on tropes of haunting as a way of bringing
an awareness of colonial history into the present in order to revise conceptions
of the contemporary nation and its cultural relations.3 Identifying the delay or
‘time lag’ that marks the emergence in the present of the ghostly figures of the
colonial era, Homi Bhabha speaks of the ‘furious emergence of the projective past’,
which manifests itself through ‘the obscure signs of the spirit world’. The belated
postcolonial acknowledgment of colonial-era history, for Bhabha, ‘impels the past,
projects it, gives its dead symbols the circulatory life of the sign of the present’.4
O’Healy · Deconstructing African femininity in Italian film 177
It is tempting to read the figure of the drowned migrant that haunts the
final section of Io l’altro precisely as a reminder of a chapter in Italian history
that is often elided in contemporary politics and media discourses and has been
largely ignored in recent Italian cinema, that is, the memory of Italy’s expansionist
adventures in the Horn of Africa from the late nineteenth century to the end of
the fascist era. I would argue, in fact, that the uncanny presence of the black
woman’s body in Melliti’s film signals a return of the repressed memory of Italian
colonialism, and at the same time obliquely draws attention to the relative absence
of this figure elsewhere in the contemporary cinematic imaginary.
The image of the African woman has a complex history in the iconography
of Italian political culture. This female figure was, first and foremost, a symbol of
the territory to be conquered by the colonist. According to Gabriella Campassi
and Maria Teresa Sega:
La donna nera diventa simbolo dell’Africa [...] e il rapporto uomo biancodonna nera è simbolico del rapporto nazione imperialista-colonia: l’uomo
è colui che dà la sua virilità fecondatrice e vivificatrice, la donna è colei che
riceve da ciò un arricchimento nella realizzazione di sè come complemento
dell’espandersi dell’io maschile.5
In the history of Italian colonialism, however, the representation of the black
female body did not adhere to an entirely stable or uniform pattern, but vacillated
between images of exotic beauty and those evoking abjection or repulsion. It is
significant that the lifeless body that emerges into the mise en scène of Io l’altro
is specifically marked as female and Somali,6 for the figure of the Somali woman
occupied a prominent place in the visualization of Italy’s colonial presence in
Africa. Karen Pinkus has noted that, of all the African women encountered by
Italians in the colonized territory, it was generally agreed that the Somalis were the
most desirable.7 This smooth-skinned figure, whose features purportedly bore a
resemblance to the physiognomy of Italians themselves, appeared in adventurers’
photographs and written accounts, as well as in fascist-era advertising, as an
enticing siren, holding the promise of passionate, illicit sexuality. Though coded as
young and beautiful, the dead Somali woman that surfaces in Melliti’s film is devoid
of these conventional erotic connotations, for she is presented as a religiously
identified, maternal figure. Furthermore, despite Yousef’s explicit recognition
of her Islamic faith, the manner in which she is framed by the camera and the
men’s initially prayerful response to her appearance bring to mind the image of the
Madonna in Christian iconography. The reinscription of the black female body
in Io, l’altro thus clearly challenges the association between black womanhood
and sexual availability that overdetermines traditional representations of African
femininity in Italian cinema.
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Writing on the representation of recent migrations in the Italian media,
Vanessa Maher observed some years ago:
The imagery evoked by the new immigration does not have an empirical
referent. It is dissociated from its historical context. A sort of collective
amnesia has swallowed up the experience of Italian emigration, of Italian
colonialism, of fascism, the knowledge of the complexity of Italian society
itself.8
This pattern has scarcely altered in the past fifteen years. Little acknowledgment
of Italy’s complicated past as both a colonial power and impoverished emigrant
nation inflects the dominant rhetoric on immigration, which is laced with images
of invasion, flooding, or contamination. Through repeated exposure to discourses
of this type, many Italians have begun to see their country as overwhelmed by an
unstoppable flow of uninvited foreign bodies that present a threat to their physical
safety, material wellbeing and cultural values.9 Within this discursive framework,
however, some ‘foreign’ bodies become more threatening and undesirable than
others, replicating age-old patterns of discrimination linked to prejudicial
perceptions of gender and racial difference.
Although black women are featured with increasing frequency on television
and in other Italian media, female characters marked as African seldom appear
in the foreground of contemporary Italian films. So far, only five feature films
produced since the early 1990s – Teste rasate (Claudio Fragasso, 1993); Besieged
(Bernardo Bertolucci, 1997); Sud side stori (Roberta Torre, 1999); Sotto il sole nero
(Enrico Verra, 2004); and Bianco e nero (Cristina Comencini, 2007) – dedicate
more than the most cursory attention to the figure of a female African migrant.
Moreover, only one of these African characters (Zaina, the Italian protagonist’s
Somali girlfriend in Teste rasate) is linked to the former colonial territories of
Italian East Africa, a fact that may be ‘explained’ by the relatively scant flow
of immigration from Eritrea, Ethiopia and Somalia at present. Nonetheless the
modes of signification through which all of these representations take shape are
clearly imbricated in colonial/postcolonial, or racist/anti-racist discourses, whether
unconsciously expressed or explicitly addressed.
While relatively infrequent in Italian cinema even during the colonial era,10
images of African women have had a longstanding importance in Italian visual
culture more generally, from the advertising practices of the fascist years to the
multiple uses of the black female body in mass media today.11 Furthermore, the
occasional, fleeting appearances of black women in prominent Italian art films
of the post-war and Cold War era have also left a decisive trace in the Italian
imaginary, as has the frankly exploitative footage of African ‘natives’ in several
films of the mondo genre. Through the repeated, ever varied reformulation of
such images down through the years since the end of fascism, vestigial memories
O’Healy · Deconstructing African femininity in Italian film 179
of colonialism are recycled, re-presented and given new life. This process helps
to articulate the construction and reception of black (and white) bodies in the
contemporary Italian context. Though identities are shaped in part by individual
bodily performances and the reiteration of such performances, both conscious and
unconscious, there is a phenomenological aspect of identity formation that has a
deeper, historical dimension. As Sara Ahmed has argued, drawing on the work of
Frantz Fanon,
bodies are shaped by histories of colonialism, which makes the world ‘white’,
a world that is inherited, or which is already given before the point of an
individual’s arrival. This is the familiar world, the world of whiteness, as a
world we know implicitly. […] Bodies remember such histories, even when
we forget them. Such histories, we might say, surface on the body, or even
shape how bodies surface […] Race then does become a social as well as
bodily given, or what we receive from others as an inheritance of this history.
[italics added]12
The black female body in the colonial imaginary
Fascism elevated to official doctrine the racist and misogynist sentiments
accompanying the call for political and cultural renewal that first resonated
throughout Europe in the second half of the nineteenth century. The evaluation
of human beings along a scale of social, racial and sexual hierarchy articulated
by positivist scientists such as Cesare Lombroso was ultimately enshrined in the
racial laws of the fascist regime in the late 1930s. Ruth Ben-Ghiat has argued that
this phenomenon was indicative of the Italian – and more broadly European –
ambivalence toward the shift to a mass society that modernity entailed. The fears
of degeneration and social anarchy that initially motivated the construction of the
political, scientific, and cultural discourses of the late nineteenth century ultimately
‘found expression under Mussolini’s dictatorship in social policies such as the
demographic crusade and the campaigns against miscegenation and against the
Jews’.13 While fascist policy accepted the inevitability of a mass society, it attempted
to create one that would protect traditional class, gender, and racial boundaries;
for this reason, Ben-Ghiat argues, it ‘held a strong appeal for intellectuals whose
desire for a modern Italy was accompanied by an equally strong fear of the blurring
of social and sexual hierarchies’.14
Partly because of Italy’s late arrival on the colonial scene, the articulation of
race in the Italian cultural imaginary was particularly complex. Sandra Ponzanesi
has shown that, within the ideological economy of fascist propaganda, the
representation of native women was double-edged. In the initial phase of the Italian
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presence in Africa, which began in the late nineteenth century, unions between
Italians and local women were not forbidden. As Ponzanesi notes:
The exotic and alluring representations of the native served the purpose
of inciting the virile and adventurous Italian soldiers and workers to
venture into the unknown, uncharted and virgin soil of Africa. The
inscriptions of the local women as ‘black Venus’ – beautiful, docile and
sexually available – corroborated the most important aspect of the rhetoric
of empire which used the sexual metaphor as a way of fusing the public
discourse with the private.15
After the declaration of the racial laws in July 1938, which instituted an
official ban on marriages between Italians and all those classified as ‘non-Aryans’,
official representations of African femininity assumed a more sinister tone.
Although the practice of concubinage (madamismo) with local women had been
practiced by Italian adventurers and settlers in Africa for decades, resulting in a
sizeable mixed-race population, miscegenation was now perceived as a stain on
the integrity of the ‘pure’ Italian race. Shortly after the enforcement of the law
prohibiting mixed marriages, the official organ of the Fascist Party, La difesa della
razza, published a sketch of Sarah Baartman – the so-called ‘Hottentot Venus’
who was exhibited at freak shows in England and France from 1810 to 1815 – as
a warning about the purported deformities that miscegenation could produce.16
Once widely distributed throughout Europe as an object of both fascination and
horror, the image of Baartman’s body was thus reappropriated by the regime, not as
a figure of intense erotic interest, but, rather, as a cautionary example of monstrous
hybridity, supposedly resulting from a mixed racial heritage that combined African
‘native’ and Dutch Boer influences.17
The reinscription of the image of the so-called Hottentot Venus in the
‘pedagogical’ register of fascist discourse is a far cry from the diffusion of the ‘Black
Venuses’ found in earlier fascist-era photography and commercial representations
of African femininity, where ‘native’ women – often nude or semi-nude – were
presented as beautiful, alluring sirens. Published in magazines or distributed as
postcards, these images are more reminiscent of the iconography of the Queen of
Sheba than the cruelly exploitative sketch of Sarah Baartman.18 Exerting a strong
influence on the visualization of the black woman’s body in Italian popular culture
in subsequent years, the earlier images of the African woman’s docility and sexual
allure were never completely eclipsed by the shift in official fascist policy.
Inscriptions of African femininity are not, of course, exclusive to the domain
of visual culture. One of the most enduring images of the African woman in the
Italian imaginary is the figure of the welcoming Ethiopian girl evoked in the
popular marching song ‘Faccetta nera’, composed to celebrate the advance of
Italian troops into Ethiopia. Interpellating the female Abyssinian subject as ‘little
O’Healy · Deconstructing African femininity in Italian film 181
black face’, the song evokes a vulnerable slave girl waiting to be liberated by Italian
soldiers, who will take her back with them to Rome. Written in 1935, before the
promulgation of the racial laws officially banned interracial unions, ‘Faccetta nera’
enjoyed enormous popularity throughout the remainder of the colonial era. Its
implicit openness to the possibility of interracial romance, however, caused it to
be banned after the imposition of the racial laws in 1938. Despite official fascist
censorship and the eventual replacement of the original version with lyrics offering
a more racially ‘hygienic’ scenario, the song was never completely forgotten.
Proof of its longevity lies in its recent revival as a cell-phone ring tone, which
suggests the articulation of a kind of imperialist nostalgia among specific sectors
of contemporary right-wing Italian youth.
The welcoming allure of the ‘little black face’ invoked in this widely known
song resonates with impressions of the smiling and seductive African woman whose
image circulated in various forms of visual culture from the 1920s to the end of the
war. Conspicuous among these is the illustration of a black woman’s face adorning
advertisements for a line of chocolates whose brand name echoes the song title,
‘Faccetta nera’. Belonging to a typology of African femininity that Pinkus calls the
‘smiling Negress’,19 the image evokes a black woman’s face with a dazzling white
smile and a complexion as smooth and dark as chocolate, beckoning to the onlooker
to consume the delights she has to offer.20 Similar images were used throughout
the early fascist era to advertise products that are considered stimulating or ‘hot’,
particularly coffee, coffee substitute and chocolate. This pattern, as we shall see,
continues to appear in advertising practices in Italy even today.
(Post)colonial amnesia in the Cold War era
Visualizations of African femininity decreased dramatically in Italian popular
culture after the end of the fascist era. In a handful of well known films of the
1950s and 1960s, however, the figure of the African woman haunts the margins
of the mise en scène, never occupying the central narrative focus, but encroaching
in silent, yet highly visible ways on the space of the ‘real’ agents of the narrative
action – white, Italian men. During this period, women of colour tend to appear
on screen for no more than the length of a dance routine or cabaret act. One of the
most memorable examples is the nightclub sequence in Fellini’s Le notti di Cabiria
(1957), which features a floorshow performed by two scantily dressed African
women. The dancers are each equipped with a long, hairy appendage, similar
to a horse’s tail, and their routine, which is accompanied by African drumbeats,
culminates in a series of frenzied vibrations, evocative of orgasmic pleasure.
Similarly, Antonioni’s La notte (1961) includes a nightclub sequence where a black
female dancer performs an eroticized acrobatic routine, in the course of which her
182 the italianist 29 · 2009
thighs, buttocks and groin are repeatedly scrutinized in close-up, to the virtual
exclusion of her face.
A fascinating counterpoint to these representations emerges in a scene in
Antonioni’s L’eclisse (1962) where the protagonist Vittoria (Monica Vitti), wearing
blackface, sporting ‘tribal’ gear and brandishing a spear, performs a frenzied dance
against a large-scale photograph of an African landscape. Preceded and followed by
a radical cut – thus withholding from the audience both the motivation and physical
process of this transformative mimicry – the performance takes place at the home
of one of Vittoria’s neighbours, a setting replete with colonial memorabilia. Marta,
the host, speaks with nostalgia for her colonial childhood in Kenya, and expresses
unabashed contempt for the natives, to whom she refers as ‘six million monkeys’.
Vittoria’s donning of native masquerade in an environment charged with such
pointedly racist discourse has an uncanny effect, heightened by the disorientation
instantiated by the radical cut. When Vittoria’s ‘blackness’ is suddenly presented in
close up, without any expository transition, the spectator must struggle to identify
her and to make sense of her sudden, radical transformation.
Although the scene had received surprisingly little scholarly attention
over the years, Pinkus has recently offered an interesting analysis of the film as
a whole within the context of Italian de-colonization.21 For Pinkus, the entire
text of L’eclisse – particularly its spatial design – constitutes an oblique reflection
on Italy’s failure to deal with, or to acknowledge in any formal, explicit way,
the collapse of its colonial ambitions. By briefly placing the narrative focus on
the British decolonization in Kenya, which was taking place at the time the film
was made, thus deflecting attention away from any consideration of the former
Italian colonies in Africa, L’eclisse mimics the kind of disavowal, or ‘eclipse’,
that was taking place in Italian cultural memory more generally. Read in this
light, Vittoria’s carnivalesque performance acquires a sinister tonality, collapsing
together references to different colonial regimes, African nations, and historical
temporalities without offering the viewer a moral or ideological compass with
which to interpret it.
The contrived frenzy of the ‘tribal’ dance in L’eclisse also points forward
to a very different vein of filmmaking, the mondo movies, a genre that drew
large numbers of mostly male filmgoers from the 1960s to the 1980s. These films
combined ethnographic spectacle, including images of women dancing barebreasted, and sensational scenes of violence and brutality. Such images were often
intercut with staged or falsified footage in order to maximize audience response. It
is significant that the most famous film in this genre, Africa addio (1966), directed
by Gualtiero Iacopetti and Franco Prosperi, explores in pseudo-documentary
fashion the violence unleashed by decolonization in several African nations, while
ignoring those countries that had been colonized by Italians.
O’Healy · Deconstructing African femininity in Italian film 183
Tempo di uccidere (Giuliano Montaldo, 1989), based on Ennio Flaiano’s
1947 novel of the same title,22 is the only film yet produced in Italy that attempts
to address the issues of Italian aggression, exploitation and failed responsibility
vis-à-vis the colonized people of Italian East Africa in the 1930s.23 Despite the fact
that the novel is still widely appreciated by the Italian public and has remained
constantly in print, the film has received surprisingly little attention from the press
and from Italian audiences more generally. Because of its unique contribution to
Italian post-colonial discourse, it merits at least a summary discussion here.
Shot largely in Kenya, Tempo di uccidere is set in Ethiopia in the midto late 1930s, and focuses on a young Italian officer assigned to the Abyssinian
campaign. Like the novel on which it was based, the film narrates the young man’s
brief, ambivalently coded, sexual encounter with a teenage Ethiopian girl, whose
death he subsequently brings about. The main body of the narrative deals with the
officer’s attempt to forget this tragic event, to conceal it from his colleagues and
superiors, and to suppress the feelings of shame and guilt that continue to haunt
him throughout the remainder of his time in Africa.
When Enrico, the protagonist (played by American actor Nicolas Cage), first
comes upon Mariam, the Ethiopian beauty who provokes his desire, she is bathing
in a woodland pool against a backdrop of cascading water. On becoming aware
of his presence she makes no attempt to hide her nudity, but proceeds to interact
with him playfully, almost childishly, without the benefit of a common language.
Mariam is thus constructed as creature of nature, inhabiting a prelapsarian
landscape where issues of shame and sexual morality appear to have no purchase.
The officer’s sudden move to possess her sexually thus seems to arise ‘naturally’ as
much from the setting as from the allure of her irresistible bodily presence. The girl,
however, offers several signs of physical resistance, which are quickly overcome
by Enrico, and the expression on her face during the scene’s climax can be read
as either pain or pleasure. Their post-coital communication, though still tinged
with ambiguity, rapidly assumes an almost complicitous tone, ending with the
girl’s decision to spend the night with her seducer in a nearby cave. Here, however,
she is badly wounded by a bullet from Enrico’s gun which had been intended for
a predatory animal. After shooting her in the head to spare her further pain, he
hides her body among the rocks and obliterates all traces of his presence from
the scene. Yet he never succeeds in banishing the disquieting memory of these
events. Observing a festering wound on his arm, he becomes convinced that he has
contracted leprosy, now suspecting that the light, white turban worn by Mariam
throughout their encounter was an indicator of her status as a leper. The film thus
offers an extended metaphorical commentary on the ‘bad conscience’ of Italian
colonialism, where the young Ethiopian girl stands in an allegorical relation to the
colonized territory, and the soldier’s malady, the cause of which he retrospectively
184 the italianist 29 · 2009
projects onto the supposedly diseased body of the innocent girl, is symbolically
linked to his own misguided actions and disavowed responsibility.
Despite its implicit critique of colonialism, the film deploys a predominantly
(but not exclusively) voyeuristic approach to the construction of the young African
woman, harking back to representational practices associated with the Italian
colonial imaginary, which continue to thrive in contemporary visual culture. In
fact, when the film was recently released in DVD format, the Italian distributors
chose to package the product in the image of that age-old icon, the Black Venus.
Thus, on the DVD cover, we find a photograph of an unclothed black woman
standing in a shallow pond against the backdrop of a waterfall in a pose that
bears no direct correspondence to any of the images in the film. Inside, there is an
equally provocative image, also bearing no relation to the mise en scène. Here we
find a black woman’s face in close-up, with her tongue protruding slightly from her
sensuous mouth. The film’s inherently critical stance on Italian colonial history is
occluded in this blatant and thoroughly conventional attempt to market the image
of the African woman as an object of erotic interest.
Contemporary media
By the end of the 1980s, migration from Africa had begun to alter the demographic
face of Italy’s major cities. While male migrants outnumbered their female
counterparts in the early years, this pattern would soon change. In the meantime,
images of black women began once again to appear in Italian advertising. Among
these images, a handful of striking posters by the controversial photographer
Oliviero Toscani earned worldwide notoriety. Commissioned by Benetton,
Toscani’s large-scale billboards were distinctive for their shock value as well as
for the absence of any allusion to the merchandise produced by the sponsoring
company. One of the early images in the series showed a naked white baby feeding
at the breast of a black woman whose neck and face are cropped out of the picture.
Although the Italian public did not react with particular concern, the response
from some foreign markets, including the United States – where the image was
interpreted as evocative of slavery – was sharply censorious. Several cultural
commentators also registered their condemnation. Describing the connotations
of this photograph, Ziauddin Sardar asserts that ‘the breasts of the black woman
play on all the archetypes of black female sexuality as well as recycling the image
of black women’s place in western society – as a nurse, sexual object, the “big
black Mama” of 1940s and 1950s Hollywood’.24 Sardar goes on to claim that
‘the new genre of postmodern advertising, pioneered by Benetton, illustrates how
a historical representation of the Other can combine colonialist notions with
contemporary repression to yield images of the Other that bring us back to the
O’Healy · Deconstructing African femininity in Italian film 185
days of cannibal savages’.25 I would argue, nonetheless, that this critique occludes
the multivalency of the specific image. The calculated sex appeal of the slim, toned
body in the Benetton advertisement is a far cry from the plump, de-eroticized
figures characteristic of ‘black Mammy’ repertoire to which this writer alludes.
More evocative of Italy’s own history of racialized representation, the figure recalls
the bodies of the Somali women that feature in Italian fascist-era photographs. The
fact that the woman’s head is missing, however, brings us once again into the realm
of the uncanny and the spectral, which resonates with the occlusion of Italian
colonial history in contemporary media.
The Miss Italy contest of 1996, in which Denny Mendez, an immigrant
from the Dominican Republic won the coveted title, galvanized the attention of
Italian television audiences and sparked a debate on race and national identity.
Unusually, this victory was enabled by Mendez’s popularity among call-in voters
rather than the votes cast by the judges appointed by the pageant organizers, which
did not favour the ‘exotic’ candidate. Following an announcement of the Mendez
victory, intense controversy broke out regarding her suitability as the ideal ‘Italian’
beauty, and opinions expressed by several prominent individuals registered a
distinctly racist edge. Michela Ardizzoni reports that several Italian commentators
insinuated at the time that Mendez’s victory reflected ‘an attempt by some of the
judges and viewers to go out of their way to prove to themselves and others that
Italy, too, was ready to accept a multi-ethnic identity’.26 According to Ardizzoni,
‘Italy had never, until the 1996 pageant, undergone such a radical reconsideration
of its own identity politics at the national level’. 27 Although Mendez’s victory
seems to have done little to increase the presence of black women in ‘glamour’
positions in the fashion or entertainment industries in Italy, appearances by women
of African origin were gradually becoming more habitual in national television
programming, if only in programs aimed at Italy’s immigrant communities, such
as ‘Nonsolonero’, ‘Un mondo a colori’, and ‘Shukran’, aired at off-peak hours.
It was not in fact until 2007 that a black woman was featured in a leading role
in a mainstream television series – RAI Fiction’s Butta la luna. In the meantime,
however, in an obvious gesture of ‘talking back’ to the host culture, a separate
beauty contest for black women, Miss Africa in Italia, was instituted in 2001.
Many contemporary Italian advertisers still use black models to sell a variety
products from chocolate to pasta to internet services in a manner that supposedly
gestures toward a more culturally diverse ways of envisioning the social scene, but
which in fact often resonates with fascist-era iconography. Ponzanesi has drawn
attention, for example, to a commercial for Parmalat drinking chocolate, where a
woman’s smooth dark skin, photographed in close up and garnished with a dollop
of whipped cream, is equated with the qualities of hot chocolate itself.28 Similarly,
Lavazza has used a black model to advertise coffee in an image that presents
the woman perched provocatively on a lavish throne, in an exoticized, high-
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kitsch formulation.29 The kind of ‘multiculturalism’ aspired to in contemporary
Italian advertising of this kind problematizes that already ambiguous term. It
is a multiculturalism conceived as a stimulating additive that can enhance the
rather bland experience of everyday, white lives. According to bell hooks’s famous
formulation, ‘within commodity culture, ethnicity becomes spice, seasoning that
can liven up the dull dish that is mainstream white culture’.30 In other words,
cultural diversity is imagined as a supplement that can be sampled at will –
consumed or spat out at the pleasure of the dominant population – rather than as
a constitutive part of a dynamic social process.
Exchanging gazes: Besieged
I shall now proceed to a close reading of the racial discourses embedded in three
relatively recent Italian films that present African female characters in a leading role,
Besieged, Sud side stori, and Bianco e nero.31 Significantly, the women at the centre
of the first two films are involved in the forms of labour stereotypically associated
with African women currently living in Italy: housekeeping and prostitution. Sud
side stori is particularly interesting in the way it suggests that these labour practices
tie in with the complex, imperializing sweep of globalization.
Filmed from a screenplay initially developed by Bertolucci’s wife, Clare
Peploe, Besieged focuses on a romance between a reclusive British musician and his
young African housekeeper against a backdrop of contemporary Rome. The film
is primarily a love story, and although some allusions to the growing presence of
African immigrants residing in Rome occur throughout the narrative, the topic of
contemporary migration is clearly secondary to the evolving romance. In fact, on
a superficial level, Besieged seems complicit with the ideological underpinnings of
colonial discourse with its insistence on the extraordinary benevolence of a white
man vis-à-vis his African employee, a woman who eventually makes her way to his
bed in what could be read as a gesture of gratitude.
The film, however, has a much greater degree of complexity than this
stripped-down narrative outline suggests. Shandurai, the protagonist, is not only
a housekeeper but is also a political exile and a student of medicine, whereas
her English employer, Kinsky, though a talented pianist, seems far more isolated
and socially inept than she. The inscription of race and class in Besieged has
nonetheless provoked strong critical reactions. Invoking nuances of the ‘Black
Venus’ stereotype, one American critic sardonically winds up his review as follows:
‘Shandurai may speak three or four languages and be a medical student but,
dazzled by the white man’s voodoo, she’s a tongue-tied, barefoot child of nature at
heart’.32 The film merits a less literal reading than this, however, since the interplay
of casting, art direction, editing, and sound design reveal a complex network of
O’Healy · Deconstructing African femininity in Italian film 187
competing discourses that render such totalizing dismissals problematical. The
discursive polarities of power and vulnerability, desire and renunciation, seduction
and surrender are articulated through an intricate weaving of stylistic techniques
that make this one of the most interesting, yet most troubling films in Bertolucci’s
body of work.
Besieged was adapted from ‘The Siege’, a short story by English writer
James Lasdun, which in turn was inspired by a tale from Boccaccio’s Decameron,
a narrative of courtly love and self-abnegation.33 Although Lasdun’s story is set
in London, Besieged unfolds in Rome. More importantly, while the geographical
origin of Lasdun’s female character, Marietta, is unknown and she remains
racially ‘unmarked’, the protagonist of Besieged is clearly designated as African.
Shandurai has, in fact, moved to Rome to study medicine following her husband’s
imprisonment under a military dictatorship in an unnamed African country. Living
at the home of her employer Kinsky, in an impressive, if slightly neglected palazzo
overlooking Spanish Steps, she does not initially disclose to him her married status
and keeps mementoes of her African past locked away in a chest. When Kinsky,
who is unaware of her history, awkwardly accosts her with a declaration of love
and proposal of marriage, she recoils, blurting out that the only thing he can do to
earn her love is to get her husband out of prison. Reluctantly accepting the need to
continue living in Kinsky’s home, she then maintains an awkward aloofness, while
he, having apologized for his ignorance of her circumstances, appears to relinquish
his romantic pursuit. As the house is gradually despoiled of its valuable contents,
however, Shandurai realizes that Kinsky has sold his possessions, including
his precious piano, in order to pay for her husband’s freedom. The eventual
announcement of the husband’s release and imminent arrival in Rome does not
bring her joy, but rather a sense of confusion, as she begins to acknowledge a
growing desire for Kinsky. Finally, having consumed a bottle of wine she had
set aside to celebrate her husband’s return, she makes her way tipsily upstairs to
where Kinsky lies asleep. The film ends as the husband arrives in Rome at dawn,
and Shandurai, awakened by the bell, slowly rises from Kinsky’s bed, perhaps to
open the door.
At the outset, Kinsky is dominant in the exchange of looks articulated by
the film, gazing down at Shandurai from an upstairs window or from the circular
staircase inside the house. She is clearly ruled by his needs, and performs a range
of servile tasks, including making his bed, mopping, cleaning, dusting, ironing,
and mending his clothes. He invades her space at night by sending her enigmatic
messages by means of the dumbwaiter, which she experiences as noisy, terrifying
intrusions. In addition, she perceives the sound of his piano music resonating
through the house day after day as foreign and intrusive. Unlike Kinsky, however,
Shandurai has an active, self-determined existence outside the confines of the
house. A medical student for at least part of the day, she scrutinizes the bodies
188 the italianist 29 · 2009
of the (white) patients she attends to, examining their X-rays or CAT scans, and
probing the abdomen of at least one white, middle-aged man with her hands. No
longer the object of the look, she instead submits others to the authority of her
professional gaze. In these scenes, it is clear that Shandurai has a sense of agency
and purpose, as well as an evolving relationship with the social landscape of Italy.
It is not surprising, then, that Shandurai soon begins to reverse the gaze even within
the space of Kinsky’s home.
Though constructed through Kinsky’s perspective as an aestheticized and
eroticized object of desire, Shandurai is also intermittently aligned with abjection.
Like other configurations of African womanhood in western cinema, she has an
overdetermined relationship to the body, its functions and excretions. At various
junctures in the film, she urinates involuntarily in a state of terror, vomits publicly
in a moment of panic, and drools when distressed. Yet, even if the script insists
on Shandurai’s Africanness, the casting of Thandie Newton, a British biracial
actress well on the way to achieving international celebrity status, undercuts the
crucial construction of the character’s origins.34 When Shandurai appears in the
same frame with other African characters, her visual difference – including her
light skin tone and fashionably slim figure – immediately sets her apart for her
interlocutors. One of the most shocking moments in the film occurs at an outdoor
market frequented by African merchants and their clients, where Shandurai looks
sharply out of place. When another African woman calls out to her by name and
approaches her with friendly concern, she recoils, unable to speak to her; then,
suddenly and inexplicably, she steps aside to vomit.
How are we to read this troubling moment? How are we to interpret
Shandurai’s visceral reaction to an encounter with a woman who, like her, comes
from Africa? Some clues regarding her traumatic relationship to the world she
has come from are revealed in the flashbacks and dream sequences that punctuate
scenes in the present tense of the narrative. Not all of these sequences are univocally
associated with Shardurai’s subjectivity. Instead, the majestic opening sequence –
featuring an aerial shot of Lake Turkana in northern Kenya – is consistent with
the epic mode of Bertolucci’s international films, such as The Last Emperor (1987)
and The Sheltering Sky (1990), and recalls the imperializing, panoramic gaze of
the colonizer.
The mood of timeless grandeur conveyed in the opening sequence eventually
gives way to images that encapsulate the suffering, political violence, and uneven
modernization of Africa’s present, ending with a sequence in which Shandurai
witnesses the brutal arrest of her dissident husband at the country schoolhouse
where he teaches. At various junctures throughout the film, the scene returns
to Shandurai’s dilapidated village, marked by encroaching capitalism, as can
be deduced from the crates of Coca Cola and piles of sports shoes lying about,
as goats graze in the main street. On the village walls are posters advertising
O’Healy · Deconstructing African femininity in Italian film 189
condoms alongside ubiquitous images of the dictator, whose face is superimposed
on a map of Africa. In one hallucinatory dream sequence, however, Kinsky’s face
unexpectedly replaces the image of the African dictator on the village posters,
revealing Shandurai’s anxiety about the unevenness of power relations between
her and her putative white suitor.
The film provides no facile resolution for the complex emotional and
political dilemmas it constructs. Withholding clear narrative closure, Besieged is
not simply a contemporary cinematic variant of the Cinderella story with racial
difference thrown into the mix. Far from negating the problems inherent in the
relationship it constructs between the reclusive Englishman and the vulnerable
African woman from a former British colony who find themselves in the interstitial
space that is Rome – a space of fluid movement and negotiation between Africa
and northern Europe – Bertolucci’s film insists on the difficulty if not impossibility
of their union, asking the viewer to ponder the destructive effects of both Kinsky’s
renunciation (since he has by now lost the piano, his apparent source of livelihood)
and Shandurai’s final capitulation to his seductive generosity.
A tale of two Souths: Sud side stori
Roberta Torre’s Sud side stori takes a very different approach to the configuration
of the African woman migrant. Like several other films in Italy’s ‘cinema of
migration’ the film constructs a story of ‘impossible’ transnational romance.
Torre’s version, however, is devoid of pathos, for it is structured not as a realist
drama but as a carnivalesque musical. Torre’s only previous feature-length film,
Tano da morire (1998), also a musical, offered an exuberant send up of Mafia
culture. Though blatantly unflattering to Sicilian society, the film was a huge hit
with local audiences. Nonetheless, when Torre applied a similar approach to Sud
side stori, which she shot under similar conditions with the help of Sicilian locals
and Nigerian women recruited from the city streets, her effort was met with much
less enthusiasm and the film was widely criticized.
Recounting the star-crossed romance between an amateur Sicilian singer,
Toni Giulietto, and a Nigerian sex worker, Romea Wacombo, the narrative unfolds
against a backdrop of the racial tensions set in motion by the arrival of a cohort
of African prostitutes on the Palermo scene. In the film’s opening minutes, the
advent of several Nigerian women dragging their suitcases through a shabby
urban neighbourhood is presented as pure carnival. Their sensational advance is
focalized through the racially biased perspective of local onlookers, who project
onto the Africans preposterous images of exoticism and barbarity. In the midst of
the phantasmagorical parade, Romea – the most visually alluring of the newcomers
– stops in her tracks to gaze at the swooning Toni, who is watching the spectacle
190 the italianist 29 · 2009
from a window above where she stands. In this encounter, which parodies and
spatially inverts the balcony scene in Romeo and Juliet, their mutual enthrallment
is forever sealed.
The manic exuberance of the arrival scene, which was clearly constructed
on a soundstage, is intercut with a chilling video sequence shot in the city streets,
recording a real-life exchange between a local man and an African sex worker
whom he propositions from his truck. Far from exoticized, the woman in this
scene is blunt and businesslike. Her command of Italian is nonetheless limited
to the range of crude terms necessary to negotiate her services, as she names a
price for each of the options she has to offer. The intercutting of this jarringly
matter-of-fact footage into the broader, carnivalesque fabric of the film as a whole
creates an uncanny dissonance. A rather similar effect is subsequently achieved
in a scene where Torre’s Nigerian performers restage their routine interactions
with the African madam and middleman at the end of each shift. Here we see
the women turning in their wages along with a statement of net takings, only to
be chastised when the money does not measure up to expectations. In this way,
the film attempts to record the extraordinary conditions in which Nigerian sex
workers operate, conditions that have been confirmed in studies of prostitution
among African immigrants to Italy at present.35
At the time the film was made, hundreds of Nigerian prostitutes were
already working in several Italian cities in circumstances tantamount to slavery,
circumstances that have changed little with the passing years. After completing
their journey to Italy, they were forced to relinquish their passports, which they
could retrieve only by paying the huge sum of L.30,000,000. As sexual encounters
brought in only about L.30,000 a session, the effort to retrieve a passport might
entail years of service on the streets. These real-life facts lend special poignancy to
the central song and dance number performed by the women in the film, the title
of which is precisely ‘Trentamila lire’.
Despite its intertextual allusions to Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet and
to Robert Wise’s West Side Story (1961), Sud side stori is above all the story of
an encounter between two Souths (the Italian south and sub-Saharan Africa),
a juxtaposition that comes perilously close to northern Italian stereotypes of
Sicily as ‘Italy’s Africa’. Throughout the film there is frequent crosscutting from
one community to the other in order to highlight the similarities between them.
Preeminent in each group is an acute sense of racial hostility. Shocked to learn of
Romea’s growing attachment to the Sicilian Toni, the Nigerian women try to coax
her away from him, offering her a list of traits that make white people unbearable.
Toni, in the meantime, is treated to similar exhortations from the aunts who raised
him, and who now describe the object of his affections as ‘una turca fitusa’. Also
present in both communities is a reliance on magic and superstition. Finally, music
has a central importance for both groups, though the film gives more prominence
O’Healy · Deconstructing African femininity in Italian film 191
to Toni’s musical tastes, and particularly to his alcohol-induced hallucinations
featuring the veteran Neapolitan crooner Mario Merola and the aging rock star,
Little Tony, than to the African rhythms associated with the Nigerian characters.
As the film progresses, Torre’s ‘tale of two Souths’ sags under the weight of these
parallel visions of exotica. It is here, in fact, that the director’s comic deployment
of stereotype begins to lose its light-hearted, ironic edge, as her representation of
the idosyncracies of both communities teeters on the edge of mockery.
The uneven results achieved by Sud side stori, despite its remarkable
visual flair, were due at least in part to the director’s difficulties with the African
performers. While the local residents were apparently able to participate in a send
up of their own social world with relative ease, the Nigerian women who were
called upon to deliver a comic re-enactment of their struggles as undocumented
immigrants and indentured prostitutes were unable to immerse themselves in their
scripted roles with comparable conviction.36 The tensions generated by the uneven
power relations inherent in this unusual ethnographic encounter thus become
palpable in the very fabric of the film, undermining its intended humour.37 Though
conceived as a mordant satire, Sud side stori lacks comedic zest, as the questions it
explores – sex trafficking, illegal immigration and racial prejudice – were far from
resolved at the time the cameras began to roll, eventually insinuating themselves
into the production process itself.38
A comedy of epidermal difference: Bianco e nero
Cristina Comencini’s comedy Bianco e nero (2008) is a crowd-pleasing, interracial
romance that unfolds in a privileged middle-class environment. Here, unlike the
two recent films that I have already discussed, all the characters, black and white,
enjoy a significant level of economic comfort. There are no allusions to clandestine
migration, trafficking in women, or other social problems that haunt the characters
in the earlier films. All signs of misery are instead relegated to faraway Africa.
Bianco e nero weaves a rather conventional tale of adulterous love, where
two married people are swept away by a spontaneous passion that threatens
to wreck their dull but otherwise perfectly stable marriages. The main obstacle
to their love hinges on the issue of racial difference and the perception of that
difference by those around them. The protagonists – the Senegalese Nadine, an
embassy employee and long-time resident of Rome, and Carlo, her comically inept
Italian suitor – are drawn together not only by mutual physical enthrallment but
also by a shared intolerance for the kind of humanitarian ardour that inspires
their respective spouses, who both work for a charitable organization catering
to Africans. Nadine shows an explicit contempt for the fact that she is routinely
192 the italianist 29 · 2009
associated with the miseries of Africa. Her confrontational attitude bespeaks a
desire to challenge and reject this discursive association.
Migration Italy, Graziella Parati’s important volume on the discourses
of immigration in contemporary Italy evokes in its subtitle, The Art of Talking
Back in a Destination Culture, the figure of the migrant as one who ‘talks back’
to the destination culture.39 Clearly, the scriptwriters of Comencini’s film have
envisioned such a figure in Nadine, though it is not always clear how much of her
cheeky rejection of conventional expectations might be attributed to an uneasy
self perception rooted in experiences of discrimination, large and small. Despite
its contrived plot and often outrageously self-conscious dialogue, in attempting
to expose the subtle racism that lurks in all communities just beneath the surface,
Bianco e nero raises many interesting questions regarding the possibility of
developing a multicultural society in Italy at present.
Though the film visibly strives to pay equal attention to both protagonists,
it is nonetheless articulated as a typical story of male maturation, focusing on
the rather infantile if charming Carlo and his personal transformation through
an encounter with a world he had never known before.40 Intolerant of his wife’s
manic activism and humanitarian zeal, Carlo initially has no desire to explore any
of the issues that underpin her projects. His interest in ‘Africa’ takes shape instead
through a system of phantasmatic projection. In his first scene in the film, he feigns
illness in order to deflect his wife’s entreaties to accompany her to a fundraiser
for an African charity. As she leaves the room, however, his gaze is drawn to the
cover of a book lying on the coffee table which bears the title Africa, as well as the
image of a black woman whose nude breast is privileged within the frame. The
foregrounding of this detail, in an aesthetically appealing photograph reminiscent
of the National Geographic tradition, serves here as a reminder of how often
the image of the nude, black breast is deployed, not only to signify a particular
type of ‘primitive’ femininity, but also to stand metonymically for the whole of
Africa.41 The close up of the breast immediately cuts to a shot of Carlo seated
at the fundraiser, suggesting that it was the lure of this semi-nude African body
that finally persuaded him to attend. Yet, bored by the images of needy children
displayed around the hall, and unable to bear the allusions to human misery that
dominate the rhetoric of the speaker, he escapes to the adjoining courtyard. It
is precisely in this context that he seems to conjure up out of the darkness the
apparition of Nadine – his imagined ‘Africa’.
Although Nadine enters the mise en scène through Carlo’s gaze as the
apparent materialization of his unspoken desire, she soon asserts her status as one
who ‘talks back’. As she approaches him, smoking, she proclaims her impatience
with the event taking place indoors. At the same time, she cheekily asks him to
acknowledge the fact that she is black, flaunting the politically incorrect term ‘negra’
instead of the more acceptable ‘nera’. In so doing, she pre-empts his own unspoken
O’Healy · Deconstructing African femininity in Italian film 193
appraisal of her appearance, so that he has no recourse other than to concur with
this assessment with embarrassed amusement. The scene could be read as a game
of unbearable stereotyping, or one that is rich in deconstructive possibilities. At
many junctures throughout the film, stereotypes are exposed and subverted, even
if this occurs in what seems at first to be a rather trite manner. The play with
stereotypes, in fact, ultimately exposes the ambivalence of colonial discourse, its
‘doubledness’, in Bhabha’s term.42 For the principal signifying component in racial
differentiation – the ‘epidermal’ difference – is visibility. This visibility is not ‘given’,
it is not offered by ‘nature’. It has to be constructed, acknowledged, and repeatedly
performed. Bianco e nero alludes at several junctures to the construction of race
in popular representations – from children’s stories and toys to cyber porn, and
even to the cinema of Fellini. In the film’s most outrageously self-reflexive moment,
Carlo attempts to rewrite the iconic Fontana di Trevi sequence from La dolce
vita. After briefly doubting the possibility of visually transforming the ethno-racial
composition of Fellini’s famous scene, Carlo scoops up the astonished Nadine in
his arms and wades into the fountain, thus pointedly substituting the spectacle
of her body (which clearly bears the contours of that age-old object of desire, the
Black Venus) for that of the blonde, Swedish-American bombshell, Silvia, played
by Anita Ekberg.
In the scenes involving the seven-year old daughters of Carlo and Nadine, the
children’s ‘recognition’ of racial difference is cultivated with the aid of Barbie dolls.
In opposition to their parents’ professed attitudes, both girls have internalized
racialized ways of seeing that impinge on their very sense of identity. They already
‘know’, for example, that white Barbie dolls are prettier than black ones; they
also ‘know’ that ‘all princesses are blonde’. In the film’s opening sequence, Carlo’s
daughter Giovanna, while out of her mother’s earshot, is playing with her two
Barbie dolls, one black and the other white. In the scenario constructed by the
child, the black doll serves as the personal maid of a white mistress, who beats
her up for an imputed failure to carry out her duties with sufficient speed. In
light of the fact that Giovanna’s mother, Elena, is an outspoken proponent of
cultural diversity and humanitarian benevolence, the candid racism expressed by
the seven-year old child may seem shocking at first. Later, however, we learn that
Giovanna’s grandmother – whose racist attitudes are poorly concealed under a
veneer of forced benevolence – employs a uniformed black maid who carries out
her duties in submissive silence. But Giovanna is not the only child who assigns to
the black doll a lower status than the blonde, white Barbie. When the scene cuts to
Nadine’s daughter, Félicité, we find the child in tears because of the unsatisfactory
outcome of her efforts to bleach her own black Barbie’s hair. As the result of her
parents’ ongoing refusal to allow her to own a white doll, Félicité eventually steals
Giovanna’s brand new ‘Barbie Bride’ at the little girl’s birthday party, precipitating
194 the italianist 29 · 2009
an embarrassing showdown with the hosts (Carlo’s in-laws), which is laced with
competing expressions of outrage, resentment, and patronizing condescension.
The film’s most exuberant send-up of racist attitudes occurs, however, at
an earlier moment in the sequence at Giovanna’s birthday party, exposing the
barely concealed prejudices of Carlo’s well-to-do in-laws, Alfonso and Adua. Still
obsessed with the memory of a Namibian woman with whom he had prolonged
tryst during a business trip to Africa some years earlier, Alfonso attempts to seduce
Nadine immediately upon her arrival, uttering outrageously exoticizing platitudes
while he steers her toward the privacy of his study. The room where the scene takes
place evokes the setting of Vittoria’s tribal dance in Antonioni’s L’eclisse, which
was dominated by African artefacts, including a stuffed elephant hoof. Alfonso’s
environment contains both a mounted elephant tusk and a large wood sculpture
of an African woman, suggesting more than a hint of imperial nostalgia. Adua
(whose very name is evocative of Italian colonial history), by contrast, can barely
control her discomfort when confronted with the unexpected guest. For Adua,
Nadine’s presence serves as a reminder of her husband’s besotted involvement
with the Namibian woman, though she struggles to disguise her anxiety with
patronizing compliments. Played out as broad farce, the scene suggests a parallel
between historical forms of colonialism and current modalities of empire,
gesturing toward the exploitation of subaltern people (through sex tourism and
other related practices) by the representatives of a new, transnational class of FirstWorld professionals. Through the figure of Alfonso, the film alludes obliquely to
new or refashioned forms of imperialist oppression linked to the expansion of the
global market.
Although Bianco e nero raises important social issues, it offers a very muted
challenge to the dominant discourse on race and migration. The Italy imagined in
Comencini’s film is a country that tacitly supports a racially divided social order.
Set against this order are two individuals who have fallen in love with each other,
challenging the conventional structure. The audience is invited to identify with the
romantic quest of the two attractive and ‘authentic’ characters who wish to defend
their love against the narrow-mindedness of those who will not support their bond.
As constructed by the film, however, the social worlds represented by Nadine
and Carlo are surprisingly similar to each other. Each of the protagonists enjoys
significant financial stability and class privilege, and each embraces a modern,
secularized approach to life. Nadine, however, is coded as the stronger, ‘richer’ –
in all senses – of the two. She has, for example, given birth to two children, a son
and a daughter, whereas Carlo and his wife have managed to produce just one
child.43 Nadine is also more elegant, worldly, and culturally informed than Carlo.
Significantly, her sleek, contemporary home is devoid of African bric-a-brac, in
pointed contrast to the other ‘African’ environments depicted in the film, and she
makes clear that she has little tolerance for the ‘tribal’ images that many Italians
O’Healy · Deconstructing African femininity in Italian film 195
associate with Africans. In short, she scarcely represents the average immigrant,
but could more accurately be classified as a cosmopolitan sophisticate.
Bianco e nero ultimately constructs the black protagonist’s ‘difference’ as
largely epidermal. Far from presenting a real threat to the social order, Nadine
contributes to the emotional development of Carlo, the Italian everyman. She
thus constitutes what Katarzyna Marciniak describes as a ‘palatable foreigner’
– an immigrant who is expected to enhance, rather than to impinge on, the
wellbeing of the nation.44 Ultimately, the film seems to propose no more than the
idea that privileged middle-class blackness is compatible with privileged middleclass whiteness, and betrays a reluctance to lay bare even the implicit power
differential between the two protagonists. Indeed, despite Nadine’s sophistication
and apparent privilege, she has much more to lose than Carlo by stepping outside
the pattern ordained by the dominant society. By smoothing over the disparity in
power represented by gender difference, and by occluding through its focus on
an upper-middle class environment the obstacles to integration faced by many of
the less privileged migrant communities, the film does not encourage audiences to
think in a wider sense of the way in which societies privilege specific formations of
class, gender and sexuality at the expense of others.45
Conclusion
In their deployment of a female African protagonist, the three recent films I have
discussed raise provocative questions about cinema’s role in the construction of
social subjects in relation to gender, race, and contemporary migrations. Each
of these films suggests that mechanisms of racial differentiation do not always
impose themselves in stark polarities of negativity and positivity, superiority and
inferiority, inclusion and exclusion. As Avtar Brah has noted, ‘whilst racialized
encounters have been predicated against a history of exploitation, inferiorization
and exclusions, they have equally inhabited spaces of deep ambivalence, admiration,
envy, and desire’.46 All three films frame this affective ambiguity within the familiar
context of a heterosexual romance, and in so doing they invite us to consider the
ways in which desire for the racialized Other is constructed and codified not only
in relation to colonial histories, but also in and through patriarchal regimes of
power. Although these films are devoid of direct references to Italian colonialism,
they are set against a social landscape marked by the increasing consolidation of
global markets and the growing dominance of multinational capital, gesturing
toward the new forms of imperial domination implicit in the globalizing process
and in the spread of mass cultural consumption.
196 the italianist 29 · 2009
Notes
1
Derek Duncan, ‘Italy’s Postcolonial Cinema and its
Histories of Representation’. Italian Studies, 63: 2 (2008),
195-211 (p. 195).
2
Jacques Derrida, Spectres of Marx: The State of the
Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International
(London: Routledge, 1994).
3
Michael F. O’Riley, ‘Postcolonial Haunting: Anxiety, Affect,
and the Situated Encounter’, Postcolonial Text, 3:4 (2007).
Available at <http://postcolonial.org/index.php/pct/article/
view/728/496> [accessed February 26, 2009].
4
Homi Bhabha, in The Location of Culture (New York:
Routledge, 1994), p. 254.
5
Gabriella Campassi and Maria Teresa Sega, ‘Uomo
bianco, donna nera: L’immagine della donna nella
fotografia coloniale’, Rivista di storia e teoria della
fotografia, 4: 5 (1983), 54-62 (p. 55).
6
Yousef’s immediate ‘recognition’ of the woman’s
national origin, which he expresses without apparent
logical justification, is one of the uncanny aspects of this
emblematic scene.
7
Karen Pinkus, Bodily Regimes: Italian Advertising under
Fascism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1995), p. 54.
8
Vanessa Maher, ‘Immigration and Social Identities’, in
Italian Cultural Studies: An Introduction, ed. by David
Forgacs and Robert Lumley (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1996), pp. 160–77 (p. 168).
9
For a study of negative attitudes toward immigrants
expressed in Italian public discourse see, among other
studies, Alessandro Dal Lago, Non persone: l’esclusione dei
migranti in una società globale (Rome: Feltrinelli, 1999).
10
Few Anglophone studies of Italian cinema of the colonial
era foreground the construction of race. Exceptions are
Robin Pickering Jazzi, ‘Ways of Looking in Black and White:
Female Spectatorship and the Miscege-national Body in
Sotto la Croce del Sud’, in Re-viewing Fascism: Italian
Cinema 1922-1943, ed. by Jacqueline Reich and Piero
Garofalo (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002),
pp. 194-219, and Ruth Ben-Ghiat ‘The Italian Colonial
Cinema: Agendas and Audiences’, Modern Italy, 8: 1
(2003), 49-63. What these studies make clear, however,
is that when racially marked women occupy a prominent
place in the diegetic unfolding of fascist-era films, they are
in most cases coded as mixed-race individuals, and are
played by white, Italian actresses. Images of ‘black’ women
tend, by contrast, to be bracketed off as ethnographic
spectacle.
11
For a detailed analysis of the racial dynamics
underpinning fascist-era advertising, see Pinkus, Bodily
Regimes. For a discussion of images of black femininity
in contemporary advertising practices in Italy, see S.
Ponzanesi, ‘Beyond the Black Venus: Colonial Sexual
Politics and Contemporary Visual Practices’, in Italian
Colonialism: Legacies and Memories, ed. by Jacqueline
Andall and Derek Duncan (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2004),
pp. 165-89.
12
Sara Ahmed, ‘A Phenomenology of Whiteness’, Feminist
Theory, 8: 2 (2007), 149–68 (p. 154).
13
Ruth Ben-Ghiat, ‘Envisioning Modernity: Desire and
Discipline in the Italian Fascist Film,’ Critical Inquiry, 23: 1
(1996), 109-44 (p. 111).
14
Ben-Ghiat, ‘Envisioning Modernity’, p. 111.
15
Ponzanesi, p. 173.
16
A painstaking reconstruction of the life and times of
Sara Baartman, the Khoikhoi woman widely known as the
‘Hottentot Venus’, is provided in Clifton Crais and Pamela
Scully, Sara Baartman and the Hottentot Venus (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2008).
17
Barbara Sorgoni, ‘ “Defending the Race” : The Italian
Reinvention of the Hottentot Venus during Fascism’,
Journal of Modern Italian Studies, 8: 3 (2003), 411–24.
18
The link with the Queen of Sheba is, in fact, explicitly
suggested in the title of a recently published diary written
by the anthropologist Giuseppe Cei, who travelled to
Ethiopia in 1938. This posthumously edited journal,
which is accompanied by fascist-era photographs and
watercolour sketches by the writer’s wife, offers a
description of the people and places that he encountered
in the course of his short expedition, including a rather
explicit account of several attractive native women he
observed as they played naked by a river while casting
flirtatious glances at the male onlookers. See Giuseppe
Cei, Faccetta nera e la regina di Saba: il diario di un
antropologo alle soglie della seconda guerra mondiale, ed.
by Marcos Cei (Florence: Polistampa, 2007).
19
Pinkus, Bodily Regimes, p. 56.
O’Healy · Deconstructing African femininity in Italian film 197
20
The image is reproduced in Pinkus, Bodily Regimes,
p. 57.
21
Pinkus, ‘Empty Spaces: Decolonization in Italy’, in A
secrets of the past. In The Location of Culture, Bhabha
uses the spectral figure on which Newton’s role is based to
illustrate his concept of postcolonial haunting.
Place in the Sun: Africa in Italian Colonial Culture from
35
Post-Unification to the Present, ed. by Patrizia Palumbo
Nigerian Sex Workers at Home and Abroad’, Journal of
(Berkeley, University of California Press, 2003), pp. 299-
Women’s History, 15 (2004), 178–85.
320.
36
22
Ennio Flaiano, Tempo di uccidere (Milan: Longanesi,
1947).
23
I am indebted to William Van Watson for drawing my
attention to this critically neglected Italian film in a paper
See, for example, Nwando Achebe, ‘The Road to Italy:
The women were ‘irregular’ immigrants when first
recruited to perform in the film. They were eventually able
to regularize their status with the help of the production
team, resulting in significant delays in the shooting
schedule.
entitled ‘The Italian Conscience and Political Unconscious
37
in Giuliano Montaldo’s Time to Kill’, presented at the
O’Healy, ‘Border Traffic: Reimagining the Voyage to Italy’,
Annual Convention of the Modern Languages Association,
in Transnational Feminism in Film and Media, ed. by
San Francisco, 27 December 2008.
Katarzyna Marciniak, Aniko Imre, and Áine O’Healy (New
24
See Ziauddin Sardar, Postmodernism and the Other:
For a more detailed discussion of Torre’s film see Áine
York: Palgrave, 2007), pp. 59-72.
The New Imperialism of Western Culture (London: Pluto,
38
1998), p. 131.
Torre in Palermo, July 2001.
25
Sardar, p. 132.
26
Michela Ardizzoni, ‘Redrawing the Boundaries
of Italianness: Televized Identities in the Age of
39
I owe this awareness to personal communication with
Graziella Parati, Migration Italy: The Art of Talking Back
in a Destination Culture (Toronto: Toronto University Press,
2005).
Globalization’, Social Identities 11: 5 (2005), 509-30
40
(p. 510).
and comedian Fabio Volo, better known as a television
27
Ardizzoni, p. 510.
28
The Parmalat image is reproduced in Ponzanesi, p. 182.
29
I am indebted to Paolo Bartoloni for drawing my
attention to this image.
Carlo is played by the popular Italian writer, actor,
and radio personality than for his roles for the big
screen. Lacking the spectacular good looks enjoyed
by several Italian screen actors of his generation, his
affable, outgoing persona brings to Comencini’s film
an appropriate embodiment of the Italian ‘everyman’.
30
bell hooks, Black Looks (Boston: South End 1992), p. 21.
He also clearly has a trace of the ‘inetto’– that quality
31
Sotto il sole nero also features several African women,
of ineptitude, which, according to Jacqueline Reich,
but none of these occupies the role of protagonist.
32
J. Hoberman, ‘Artists in Love’, Village Voice, 44: 21 (1
June 1999), 119.
33
The tale of Dionora and Ansaldo is the fifth story of the
tenth day.
34
Newton’s presence in the mise en scène, however,
provides an important intertextual element that introduces
the trope of spectrality. Just before appearing in Besieged,
the actress played a pivotal role in Beloved (Jonathan
Demme, 1998), the adaptation of an acclaimed novel by
African-American writer Toni Morrison. Here, Newton
appears as a ghostly revenant who comes to haunt her
mother’s household after the woman’s emancipation
from slavery, refusing to let the mother ignore the dark
characterized his more famous predecessor Marcello
Mastroianni. See Reich, Beyond the Latin Lover:
Marcello Mastroianni, Masculinity, and Italian Cinema
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004).
41
In a critique of the gendered operations inherent in
Bhabha’s construction of blackness, Tania Modleski has
pointed out how black femininity is often deployed, even
in the work of prominent contemporary theorists such as
Bhabha, to connote human origins in general; in other
words, the black woman serves as a figure that facilitates
an imaginary return to the source of life, collapsing ‘sexual
and racial difference as oceanic plenitude’. See Tania
Modleski, ‘Cinema and the Dark Continent: Race and
Gender in Popular Film’, Feminist Film Theory: A Reader,
198 the italianist 29 · 2009
ed. by Sue Thornham (New York: New York University
Press), pp. 321-35 (p. 323).
42
Drawing on the work of Fanon, Bhabha writes,
‘Stereotyping is not the setting up of a false image which
many recent Italian films, where it is accompanied by a
sense of anxiety. See P. Sutton, ‘The Bambino Negato or
Missing Child of Contemporary Italian Cinema’, Screen,
46: 3 (2005), 353-60.
becomes the scapegoat of discriminatory practices. It is a
44
much more ambivalent text of projection and introjection,
Marciniak, Imre, and O’Healy, pp. 187-205.
metaphoric and metonymic strategies, displacement,
45
See Katarzyna Marciniak, ‘Palatable Foreignness’, in
Although beyond the scope of this study, it may be
over-determination, guilt, aggressivity; the masking and
fruitful to compare the social world constructed in Bianco
splitting of “official” and phantasmatic knowledges to
e nero with that conjured up in the recent television series
construct the positionalities and oppositions of racist
Butta la luna (2006-7/2009), produced by RAI Fiction.
discourse’. Bhabha, pp. 81-82.
Already at the end of its second season, the series stars
43
It is tempting to read this detail in terms of Italians’
Fiona May as a Nigerian immigrant to Italy who has
declining birth rate and the contrastingly higher birth rate
produced a white daughter as the result of an early liaison
of Italy’s immigrant communities. According to Paul Sutton,
with an Italian.
the phenomenon of the ‘bambino negato’ – the tendency
46
Avtar Brah, ‘Re-framing Europe: En-gendered Racisms,
observed among many contemporary Italian couples to
Ethnicities and Nationalisms in Contemporary Western
limit their offspring to a single child in order to preserve
Europe’, Feminist Review, 45 (1993), 9-29 (p. 11).
a higher standard of living – is reflected in the subtext of
Áine O’Healy, Loyola Marymount University [email protected]
© Department of Italian Studies, University of Reading and Departments of Italian, University of Cambridge and University of Leeds
10.1179/026143409X12488561926306