Porous borders

african european identity in The Color Line, by Igiaba Scego

Abstract

This article intends to investigate how the writer Igiaba Scego, in the novel The Color Line (2020), revisits the Italian past to demonstrate that Italy was built as white, hiding people of other ethnic-racial origins from its history. The question about the non-white Italian past draws the attention of the two protagonists: Lafanu Brown, a black American with indigenous origins, who travels to Italy in the 19th century to become a painter; and Leila, an Italian-Somali art curator who researches Lafanu's work in contemporary times. Through the perspective of both, we get to know an Italy full of monuments that prove the passage of people from other cultures through the peninsula. Furthermore, Scego discusses the contemporary cultural identity of subjects who were born and/or raised in Italy, but who have other cultural backgrounds. Our aim is to shed light on a little-known past (even for Italians) and reinforce the need for a debate regarding this identity formation in which different cultural identities intersect. In this sense, the analysis carried out here will consider authors from different theoretical-methodological perspectives that deal with themes such as Hall (2019), Mbembe (2018), Giuliani (2013) and Otele (2021).