Saturday, April 16, 2016
Assembly C (DoubleTree by Hilton Philadelphia Center City)
This paper examines processes of sorting and resettling people caught up in the Italian imperial project at the end of the Second World War. Finding themselves in occupied territories on the front lines of an African campaign, Italian colonial settlers were recognized as refugees and given state assistance for repatriation. But national identities in the colonial context were highly contested. Who qualified as Italian in the colonial context was not always clear, and not everyone who did qualify wanted to leave the colonial space. In Rome, officials of the Ministry of Italian Africa grasped onto the designation of refugee status for colonial settlers as an opportunity to repurpose their defunct agency. The imperial infrastructure rebranded itself as an office of humanitarian aid as they sorted the Italians from the non-Italians to organize their repatriation. The use of colonial soldiers to staff camps built to receive and facilitate the repatriation of these Italian settler-refugees added another wrinkle as African veterans and people of mixed race made the case for Italian citizenship in the new republic. How did individuals navigate the uncertain categories at the end of empire in Italy? As settlers and administrators tried to repurpose the imperial project, what images of the future of Italy’s position in the Mediterranean emerged as a consequence?
