Cristina Lobardi-Diop, Associate Professor of Italian Studies, American University of Rome; Visiting Research Scholar, Department of Women’s Studies and Gender Studies, Loyola University of Chicago

In the wake of the historic election of the first black President of the United States, Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi shocked the world with an uncanny remark that referred to Barack Obama as “young, beautiful, and with a tan.” The reference to Obama’s racial identity – Berlusconi explained – was intended as a joke, but it is precisely the euphemistic humour employed by Italy’s most prominent politician that reveals the unrelenting effects of the displacement of race in contemporary Italy.

The author locates the “purging” of race in Italy’s post-economic boom and finds traces of its disappearance from public memory in post-1945 advertising images for beauty and cosmetic products and in contemporary TV and billboard campaigns, including the famous All the Colours of the World by Benetton. The author argues that Italian (and more largely, European) advertising positions blackness at a crucial intersection between beauty, spectacle, interracial sexuality, and racial hetero-normativity. In this particular place, where race is distributed and dispersed as commodity, the visual consumption of both black and white bodies hints at the possibility of a deregulated and undeterred interracial sexuality in the name of the free circulation of neo-liberal commerce. As David Theo Goldberg suggests, also in Italy the post-racial, in declaring the apparent liberation from race, functions to cement the racially fortified borders of the new Europe, where the institutional causes and pervasive effects of contemporary racism against people of African descent are simply displaced and washed away.

Cristina Lobardi-Diop is Associate Professor and former Chair of Italian Studies at the American University of Rome and currently Visiting Research Scholar in the Department of Women’s Studies and Gender Studies at Loyola University of Chicago. She is the recipient of a Distinguished Visiting Professorship at the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities of Northwestern University, of several fellowships (Fulbright, McCracken, Mellon,) and a book prize (Nonino International). She has been Visiting Professor at UC Berkeley, NYU, and Northwestern University. Her essays on gender and Italian colonial literature, African-Italian autobiographies, Mediterranean and Atlantic diasporas, and space, race, and migration have appeared in edited collections and journals such as Italian Culture, Romance Language Annuals, Afriche e Orienti, and Interventions. She is currently at work on a book-length monograph on the memory of Italian colonialism in Italy’s post-war cultural history and on an edited collection tentatively entitled Postcolonial Italy.