Emerging pasts: the rearrangement of colonial collections in Italy and the involvement of diaspora communities

This thesis is based on the study of two cases concerning the re-exposition of colonial collections in Italy: the arrangement of the Museo Italo Africano Ilaria Alpi in Rome and the new exhibition of the permanent collection at the Mudec museum in Milano, which includes a room dedicated to colonialism. The aim of the research is to explore the way these cultural institutions are working with Italy’s colonial heritage and what kind of narratives will be proposed. My investigation particularly focuses on the modalities of involvement of diaspora communities in the rearrangement process, the international dimension of these projects and their critical issues. In order to answer to these questions, the research is based on a combination of literary reviews, other written and audio-visual materials and semi-structured interviews. The latter are addressed to a range of involved actors: the curators of these projects, scholars and artists engaged in the topic and representatives from diaspora communities, in order to provide also their perspective on these initiatives. The theoretical framework upon which this research is conducted is presented in the first two chapters. The first one explores scholarly discussions about colonial heritage, focusing on the political and hegemonic dimensions of heritage, the relationship between heritage, history and memory and the concept of “dissonant heritage” in relation to the emerging perspectives of diaspora communities and other people involved in such “shared” past. The second chapter outlines the European context in which colonial museums were established and the close ties between the exposition of “the other” and the construction of national identities, as well as contemporary applications of new museology’s collaborative practices to construct multivocal and “decolonized” narratives around colonial collections. Then, the dissertation proceeds with the presentation of the Italian case, analyzing the construction of Italianness through colonial culture, the amnesic politics which followed the loss of colonies with the consequent archiving of colonial heritage, and recent debates about how to deal with Italy’s colonial past. In the last two chapters, the two case studies are presented and the results of the research are discussed. In this way, an overview of both rearrangement projects is provided, and a comparison between the two cases is proposed, in order to bring to light their limits and potentialities.