Decolonizing Italian Literature, Culture, and Society through a Postcolonial and Intersectional Approach

In this lecture, Caterina Romeo discusses the importance of Italian postcolonial literature and its major contribution in the process of decolonizing Italian culture and society. Romeo analyzes the resistance that the postcolonial paradigm has encountered on the one hand from the Italian academia—which has been reluctant to acknowledge the postcolonial perspective as valid to examine the Italian culturescape—and on the other from the transnational approach, that conceives of  Italian literature and culture as being shaped at a transnational level, but is not so attentive to the social dynamics in contemporary Italy. Romeo will illustrate how writers with a migratory background (broadly intended) have repeatedly exposed the persistence of colonial systems of power—such as processes of racialization and mechanisms of marginalization and exclusion— in present-day society, and have reshaped the very notion of an Italian national identity and of collective narratives that shape italianità. Caterina Romeo then provides a brief overview of Italian postcolonial literature since its inception in 1990, and, in the last part of the lecture, she presents a case study —the anthology Future—and illustrates how a postcolonial approach combined with an intersectional approach can be utilized in the study of Italian literature and culture.  

Caterina Romeo is an Associate Professor at Sapienza Università di Roma, where she teaches Literary Theory, Gender Studies, Migration and Postcolonial Studies. She is the author of four monographs, the most recent of which is Interrupted Narratives and Intersectional Representations in Italian Postcolonial Literature (2023), and has co-edited a number of volumes and special issues, among them the collection Postcolonial Italy (2012) and a special issue of the Journal of Postcolonial Writing titled Intersectional Italy (2022), which in 2024 was selected as part of the Routledge Special Issues as Books (SPIBs) programme and recently published as a book Routledge 2025). She has translated into Italian the work of numerous Italian American women writers, among them Louise DeSalvo and Kym Ragusa. Her essays on postcolonial theory, postcolonial literature, representations of Italian Blackness, and Italian American culture have been published in national and international journals and edited volumes. 

This lecture will be livestreamed on the Department's YouTube channel.

All times stated in Eastern time.