In our third episode of season 3, Tilly Lyons, a PhD student in Italian and History, briefly overviews the history of Africans in Italy between 1922 and 1945. In this episode, she contextualises the discursive landscape in which they found themselves in a colonial time where anti-Black propaganda was rife and discusses two case studies from the archives of the Ministry for Foreign Affairs in Rome.
Primary Sources:
‘Anna and Aden Bin Mohamed’, Ministero Africa Italiana vol. I 1857-1939, Posizione 35/9, Archivio Storico del Ministero degli Affari Esteri.
‘Osman Rorá’, Ministero Africa Italiana vol. I 1857-1939, Posizione 35/9, Archivio Storico del Ministero degli Affari Esteri.
Lidio Cipriani, Per un censimento delle genti di colore residenti in Italia, Ministero Africa Italiana Gabinetto Archivio Segreto 1925 – 1942, busta 70, Archivio Storico del Ministero degli Affari Esteri.
Secondary Sources:
Saidiya Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval, (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2019).
Margherita Sarfatti & Brian Sullivan, My Fault: Mussolini As I Knew Him, Enigma Books, 2013.
Alberto Sbacchi, ‘Italy and the Treatment of the Ethiopian Aristocracy, 1937-1940’, The International Journal of African Historical Studies 10(2) (1977), 209-241.