Transforming Italy Through Literature and Cinema? Voices and Gazes of Racialised Artists

Abstract

This chapter analyses how the cultural production of racialised artists has exposed the Italian colonial archive and contested the dominant representation of Italians as “good/innocent people”. Based on qualitative research, it shows how racialised artists use literature and cinema as tools to affirm their political subjectivity and to contest the place assigned to children of immigrants in Italian society. The first section focuses on how Black and Muslim women writers have committed themselves to naming the long-lasting racism/sexism of Italian society through literature. Subsequently, we show that, according to these racialised artists, the time has come to “change the narrative” in Italian audio-visual productions. Finally, we offer some concluding remarks on how the struggle of racialised artists is hampered by structural conditions and reveal what collective strategies they use to cope with these material difficulties.