Abstract

This article tries to bring into focus the dimension of whiteness that has run-through, deeply but rarely explicitly, the colonial experience of Italians in Ethiopia, that was the subject of my work "Colonia per maschi". In that work the focus was already on the analytic categories of gender and race, but the point of view was that of the Italian colonisers, with their gaze turned above all towards the Other, the colonised, the black: the portrait, or the self-portrait of the white male, his image and features, are therefore to be traced through opposition or similitude with those of the black male. In the "colonial situation", in fact, the masculinity and whiteness of the coloniser are always connected but they are both taken for granted and therefore result as difficult to grasp, if not invisible. I have therefore tried to give them visibility through examining the discourses and material practices concerning inter-racial relationships and mixed blood children.