How do the anticolonial resistances in Libya and Ethiopia influence the political imaginaries of the antifascist movement in Italy? Amalie Elfallah addresses this striking absence of the so-called “Oltremare” (overseas) in the history of Partisans’ Resistenza. Together, we imagined what the literary work of Alessandro Spina (aka Basili Shafik Khouzam) and Maaza Mengiste could bring to these imaginaries.
The plaque bearing Via Tripoli marks the street running parallel with the Arno River filtering to the waterfront piazza of the Central National Library of Florence. It’s by no coincidence that places d’oltremare delineate significant national institutions linked to Italy’s colonial legacies inherited by the nation’s expansionist and extractive practices just once century ago. According to the scholars at the European University Institute in Florence who initiated the digital project Post-colonial Italy: Mapping Colonial Heritage, “the Florentine city government under the mayor Filippo Corsini decided to rename the street into Via Tripoli in order to commemorate a successful conquest” in the same year of the 1911-12 Italian-Turkish War. Cities and towns across Italy bear the names of places once marched during invasion, once inhabited during colonization, once toured during exploration but, by no means if seen, nearly remembered beyond the gaze of their formerly occupied name.