Einleitung

Introduction: Critical issues in the study of visual and material culture of Italian colonialism

“…Rather, when studying the objects produced to buttress imperial domination it might be more productive if these two approaches were in dialogue. In this way, it is possible to address both issues of representation and sensorial presence (Yonan 2011; Cordez 2018; Kaske and Saviello 2019). As Angelo del Boca famously wrote, the ‘private museum of Italians’, the collection of weapons, postcards, posters, magazines, albums, and other ephemera that many Italian families still preserve at home – and which might very well include the materials studied by our contributors as well – is both a museum of objects and of images that record, celebrate, and memorialise colonial experience (Del Boca 1996).…”