Per una mappatura transnazionale dell’assegnazione del colore tra colonialismo e condizione postcoloniale

Abstract

My essay explores processes of naturalisation and inferiorisation of the racialised Other in a series of colonial and postcolonial situations. Its aim is to map colour assignments along some transnational trajectories of travelling raciliased ‘images’. Specifically, it focuses on the visual reproduction of racialisation. Its premise is an idea of race as a discursive construction that uses visual texts to signify a position of subalternity (Hall 1997b). The persistence of the visual construction of racialised inferiority in history is analysed through a number of images that reproduce particular racialised meanings in popular culture: these visual texts legitimise orientalist and inferiorising readings of ‘diversity’ that can dissimulate their racist charge due to their popularisation. Intervening critically on the recent debate on the urge of erasing the word ‘race’ from the Italian Constitution, my paper argues for the importance of the maintenance and re-signification of this term in order to capture the silent reproduction of inferiorising processes.