| Summary: | Since the liberal era, “half-breeds” have been one of the greatest problems Italian colonial racism had to face. From the initial absence of explicit prohibitions to useless and confused attempts to stop “interracial sexual unions” (long tolerated only in the form of the “madamato”), to the Empire’s final prohibition of “unions of conjugal nature” between “nationals” and “subjects” (which introduced the asymmetry of the entwined relationship of race and gender; see Sòrgoni 1998), the “miscegenation” problem was continuously short circuited by the popular image that the racist discourse had helped construct.
After WorldWar II, while the new republic attempted to put the ugliness of colonialism behind as the mere product of fascist barbarism, a heavy silence fell around the issue of the “mixed” children who were abandoned by their Italian fathers in Africa, while the birth of “mulatto” children by “Italian” women and non white allied soldiers, reintroduced the “problem” in the heart of the metropolis.
In this paper , using archival documents, and iconographic, literary and cine-matographic sources, I analyze the strategies empluyed to conceal the unions and births of those who would represent, to cite an Italian deputy during a Constituent Assembly session in 1947) “the […] Nation’s abjection” because of the “Italian-black colour of their cheeks.” The analysis reveals the persistence of violent relationships of domination after the war, simultaneously “racial- ized” and “gendered”, which are still affecting our postcolonial present.
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