This workshop focuses on the history and the afterlife of the Italian colonisation in Africa through the lens of the biography. It aims to do so by exploring how individuals and groups actively operated within the colonial system and how individual trajectories challenge a dichotomised division between the colonisers and those who were subjected to colonial rule.
Recent studies (Renders, De Haan and Harmsma 2017; Van Walraven 2020; Chelati Dirar and Pallaver 2024; Chelati Dirar and Camilleri 2025) have shown the importance of the biography as a powerful tool to explore the complex entanglements between imperial spaces and individual lives, shedding new light on the agency, in particular, of marginal subjects in their interaction with historical events, social structures, and cultural processes.
Starting from the historical experience of the Italian colonisation in the North and in the Horn of Africa, this workshop intends to answer the following set of questions: What can we learn about the history of Italian colonialism by combining the settler colonial studies (Wolfe 2013) with the biographical approach? In what way can the biography be useful to question the temporality of Italian colonialism and even problematise the settler colonial studies?
In order to explore these issues, the workshop places biography and micro-history at the centre of reflection as an interpretative modality capable of bringing together multiple places and temporalities, and of revealing the interconnections between private and public dimensions in a network of imperial entanglements. The contributions focus, from time to time, on the trajectory of individuals or social groups, but also take into consideration the biography of enterprises, activities, and even single objects that in their materiality refer to unequal economic, social, political or cultural power structures and are in any case ascribable to the long duration of Italian colonialism in Africa.
This workshop concludes a series of scientific meetings held at the KNIR as part of the SECOPS project from 2024 to the present. It aims to provide an opportunity to reflect, in a deliberately interdisciplinary space and using different methods and approaches, on the way in which settler colonialism has shaped and continues to shape the contemporary world.
9 October 2025 | 17.00-19.00 | Public Lecture KNIR Research Dialogue: Italian Settler Colonialism and Genocide. Click here for more information and to register. Please note that except for the public lecture, this workshop is a closed event.
© image: Ethiopians greeting the depiction of Mussolini at Mekelle, November 1935 – Wikimedia Commons.
