How do creative practitioners use transmedial praxis to illuminate Italian colonial amnesia and the persistence of colonial subjectivities today? During my doctoral research into how intermediality studies enrich our analysis of postcolonial narratives, I became aware of the dearth of studies conducted on the cultural significance of transmedial postcolonial narratives. Building on Charles Burdett’s assertion that ‘research into the transmedial communication of knowledge is of undeniable importance’, if we want to explore the legacies of colonial activity in the fabric of contemporary society (Burdett 2022: 17), this blog post briefly examines one example of how writers, artists and activists engage with transmedial practices both to dispel Italy’s colonial amnesia and to highlight the persistence of the colonial mentality.
The first example concerns what the writing collective Wu Ming has defined ‘Progetto transmediale multiautore sulla famiglia Marincola’ [a multi-author transmedial project on the Marincola family] (Wu Ming 2013). The nonfiction transmedial storyworld comprises two micro-narratives that recount the respective biographies of Giorgio and Isabella Marincola. Born in Mogadishu to Aschirò Hassan, a Somali woman, and Giuseppe Marincola, an Italian soldier stationed in the colony of Somalia, the two siblings were taken from their mother at a very young age and relocated to Italy to be raised as Italian within their father’s family.
To borrow from Marie-Laure Ryan’s study on transmedial storytelling, Carlo Costa and Lorenzo Teodonio’s book Razza partigiana: Storia di Giorgio Marincola (1923-1945) (2008) acts as the ‘Mother ship’ of the Marincola’s storyworld (Ryan 2020: 21). It functions as the ‘main gate’ into the storyworld because it provides extensive information about the political and cultural context permeating Italy during the fascist regime (Ibid.). The writer Wu Ming 2 has contributed substantially to the expansion of this storyworld. For several years, he not only staged and performed the concert-reading Razza partigiana (2009) across Italy, but he also published the book Basta uno sparo: Storia di un partigiano italo somalo nella Resistenza (2010) distributed together with a CD recording of the show. The website www.razzapartigiana.it maps how several artworks, documents, and cultural initiatives strive to recover the neglected history of the Black partisan Giorgio Marincola, constructing a counter-history to the established whitewashed narrations of the Italian Resistance. As attested by Giorgio’s speech, delivered on the fascist Radio Baita following his capture by Nazi troops, his struggles in the Resistance were not limited to liberating the Italian peninsula from Nazi-fascism. His desire was to see any country, including Italy’s colonies, free from fascist oppression. Interestingly, the story line concerning Giorgio converges into another storyworld that Wu Ming 2 has called ‘partigiani migranti’ [migrant partisans] (Wu Ming 2 2019), which collects books and films narrating the stories of combatants from several countries in the anti-fascist Resistance. This transmedial universe includes Matteo Petracci’s 2019 book, Partigiani D’Oltremare: Dal corno d’Africa alla Resistenza Italiana, which retraces the story of the colonial subjects who, after evacuating the indigenous villages at the Overseas Exhibition in Naples in 1943, joined the Resistance in the Marche region of Italy.
The story of Isabella, Giorgio’s sister, is narrated in the short film Quale razza (2008), directed by Aureliano Amadei which was followed by the novel Timira. Romanzo meticcio (2012), written by her son Antar Mohamed and Wu Ming 2.The artworks describe how, throughout her life, Isabella battled both with exoticising representations of her Black body, especially during her career in artistic and cinematographic circles in Rome, and with the residual colonial imaginaries that have persisted in contemporary Italian society. The multi-author concert-reading Come fratelli e sorelle: Vite profughe, esistenze partigiane (2012), performed by Tamara Bartolini and Michele Baronio, comprises segments of both Giorgio and Isabella’s narratives.
The commemorations of the centenary of Giorgio Marincola’s birth on 23 September 2023 demonstrate that the Marincola storyworld continues to expand to this day. In fact, groups of activists organised several cultural activities in different Italian cities to honour Giorgio’s memory. Furthermore, the number of articles published to commemorate the anniversary demonstrates the successful dissemination of Giorgio’s transmedia narrative.
In conclusion, this blog has examined briefly how the Marincola transmedial project displays transmedial communication, through the dispersion of historical elements embedded within several media objects. This is important as it enables the project to reach the attention of as wide a public as possible, deconstructing before it the concept of whiteness as the defining category of national belonging, while simultaneously uncovering Italy’s colonial past.
Article written by Adil Mauro which was published by the magazine Rolling Stone on 23 September 2023.
Works cited:
Burdett, Charles, ‘The Transnational Study of Italian Culture and the Ghosts of Empire’, Journal of the British Academy, 10 (2022), 1-19.
Ryan, Marie-Laure, ‘Transmedia Storytelling and Its Discourses’ in Transmediations. Communication Across Media Borders, ed. by Niklas Salmose and Lars Elleström (New York: Routledge, 2020), pp. 17-30.
Wu Ming, ‘Speciale #PointLenana e #Timira | Narrazioni ibridate tra Limonov e il Corno d’Africa’, Giap, 20 December 2013 < https://www.wumingfoundation.com/giap/2013/12/speciale-pointlenana-timira/ > [Accessed 24 September 2023].
Wu Ming 2, ‘Partigiani migranti. La Resistenza internazionalista contro il fascismo italiano’, Giap, 15 January 2019 < https://www.wumingfoundation.com/giap/2019/01/partigiani-migranti/ > [Accessed 24 September 2023].
