Abstract

This essay deals with four Italian colonial novels published between 1925 and 1934. It aims at highlighting the degree of interconnection between race-based and gender-based narratives in the Italian cultural experience of the Overseas. The main focus is on the colonial novel as an archive of models of masculinity and whiteness; not a coherent archive, but a complex and contradictory one. After a brief overview of the editorial history of the phenomenon of colonial novel in general, I will argue that the four models of virility that can be found in these novels are utterly incompatible and, at the same time, that they are built around a coherent core (the undoubted supremacy of the white man) and deployed through the same narrative structure (a racialized set of narrative functions).