Race in Post-Fascist Italy

Focusing on the experiences and representations of the 'brown babies' born at the end of World War Two from the encounters between Black Allied soldiers and Italian women, this book explores the persistence of racial thinking and racism in post-fascist and postcolonial Italy. Through the use of a large variety of historical sources, including personal testimonies and the cinema, Silvana Patriarca illustrates Italian – and also American – responses to what many considered a 'problem'. She sensitively analyses the perceptions of race/color among different actors, such as state and local authorities, Catholic clerics, filmmakers, geneticists, psychologists, and ordinary people, and her book is rich in detail about their impact on the lives of the children. Uncovering the pervasiveness of anti-Black prejudice in the early democratic republic, as well as the presence and limitations of anti-racist sensibilities, Race in Post-Fascist Italy allows us to better understand Italy's conflicted reaction to its growing diversity.

Silvana Patriarca is a Professor of History at Fordham University in New York City. She specializes in the history of modern Italy and, in particular, in the cultural history of nationalism and the construction of national identities. She is the author of the award-winning Numbers and Nationhood: Writing Statistics in Nineteenth-Century Italy and of Italian Vices: Nation and Character from the Risorgimento to the Republic, both published by Cambridge University Press.