Most scholarship on Italian colonialism treats Italy’s colonies as geographically and conceptually separate from the metropole, but this project overturns this division by taking as a starting point the position that the racial order of Fascist Italy was not constructed through its overseas empire alone. This shift in analytic focus redefines where colonialism is studied and how it is understood, positioning the metropole as a racial site rather than a neutral backdrop. My research intervenes directly in the metropolitan context by reading the archive through the lived experiences of Black people rather than treating them as footnotes to Italian history. It treats Black presence as constitutive of Italian national and imperial identity, showing how everyday life and institutions intersected with the racialised understanding of the state. This paper will focus on case studies that highlight forms of resistance (and micro-resistance), protest or subversion acted out by Black individuals in metropolitan Italy. This paper seeks to form a bridge between Saidiya Hartman’s study of ‘the beauty of black ordinary’ that arises from ‘the beauty that propels the experiments in living otherwise’ with the historical context of the Fascist period.

Mathilde Lyons is a PhD student in Italian and History at the University of St Andrews. Her research focuses on the experiences of Black people, mainly from Italy’s East African colonies, who lived in Italy during the Fascist period (1922-1945).