‘Il diavolo ha fatto il meticcio’: Fascist Constructions of Mixed-race Identities in Italian East Africa, 1933-1940

This thesis presents the sociohistorical conditions that informed the anti-miscegenation racial politics and racial projects of Fascist Italy between 1933 and 1940. Italian racial exclusion projects of the 1930s were a means of reifying narratives about an Italian national identity that was, in turn, conflated with Whiteness. Adopting a race-conscious approach to Italian Studies, the thesis examines how race and anti-Blackness were constructed in the spatiotemporal context of metropolitan Italy and Italian East Africa. It employs, in an innovative manner, Michael Omi and Howard Winant’s framework of Racial Formation so as to analyse the multiple fronts on which Fascism launched its targeting of mixed-race people in Italian East Africa. I identify the way race was conceptualised during this period before outlining the colonial laws introduced to curb the number of mixed-race births in Italy's colonies and the scientific and political discourses that shaped the laws. These define the symbiotic and reciprocal relationship between the state and civil society in constructing mixed-race people of African and Italian heritage as non-Italian, a distorted legacy which continues to this day.