Learning about colonialism: high school students´ perception of Italian colonial history

Abstract

Unlike the case of other European colonial powers that took part in the imperialist project between the end of the 1800s and the early 1900s, the Italian colonial experience in Libya and the Horn of Africa (1889-1947) does not count with extensive literature, either academic or artistic. The reason why this is so, in that the colonial venture has long been envisaged by the post-war political ruling class as a parenthesis of national history marked by shame and defeat whose public debate would create both internal controversies and international disapproval. The topic of colonial memory has long been dismissed and repressed on two fronts: at an institutional level, admission of colonial wrongdoings publicly happened only in the nineties; at an academic level, archives of the official colonial documentation have been set aside under the monopoly of an especially created committee thus greatly hindering historiographical research. These two issues become intertwined in the debated framework of public education, where history teaching becomes the tool for the reproduction of collective memory and the shaping of national identity. This research analyses the still withstanding legacy of colonial history among young Italians employing three different approaches to the qualitative methodology. A range of topics come into play when the legacy of colonial history and its memory meet the dynamic, multicultural, postcolonial Italian society that has been developing in the contemporary global era: perception of the immigration phenomenon, racist revivals, eurocentrism, definition of Italianness and survival of myths.