Postcolonial melancholia? Selective colonial memory in Italian foreign policy relations with the Oltremare

This paper draws attention to the role of colonial memory in Italy’s foreign policy relations with its former colonies across the Mediterranean. Italian colonial past has been long relegated to the margins of Italian politics and public debate, with substantial repercussions on the foreign policy relations between the former colonial motherland and its former colonies of Libya, Ethiopia, Eritrea, and Somalia. The marginalisation of memory is even more noticeable as these former colonies are now the sending countries of a non-negligible share of immigrants arriving on Italian shores, and becoming the target of Italian anti-immigrant attitudes. While recent academic attention has been devoted to the selective colonial memory seeping into Italian culture, scarce attention has been paid to colonial memory in contemporary Italian foreign policy. Therefore, by applying Critical Discourse Analysis to semi-structured interviews with Italian populist radical right representatives from the Lega and Fratelli d’Italia (FdI), embedded within the broader historical context of the so-called Italy’s Second Republic (1990-present), this paper aims at investigating which role colonial memory plays in Italy’s colonial apologies, aid, and diplomatic relationships with dictators in power in what used to be the Italian Oltremare. This paper argues that, since the 1990s, Italian foreign policy vis-à-vis former colonies has been driven by the construction of selective colonial memory of Italy’s colonial past, cleansed from its most controversial aspects. Contrary to the trend observed in other former colonial European powers, instead, postcolonial melancholia has no meaningful impact in this realm.