Art of Darkness: The Aestheticization of Black People in Fascist Colonial Novels

Abstract

Propaganda about race and racial identity in Italy is most commonly discussed in the context of the Fascist regime’s 1938 race laws, which asserted the superiority of the Italian race on the basis of biological differences between Italians and the black colonial subjects and Jewish minorities living on Italian territory. In reality, racial propaganda appeared much earlier. As early as the 1880s, indigenous black women began to appear in illustrated pamphlets depicting Italy’s exploration of Africa, and the extensive photographs, drawings, and written accounts of African women indicate that colonialism had found a powerful instrument for capturing the Italian imagination through depictions of African females as dark, large-breasted black Venuses. Beyond increasing sales and promoting territorial conquests, the eroticization of native women as nude or semi-nude black Venuses emphasized a desire to be subjugated. As Sandra Ponzanesi has suggested in her analysis of the relationship between race and gender as well as politics and colonialism, native women were shown as possessing a sexual allure and willingness to be conquered that was not permitted for European women, or that European women were seen to have lost (166).