Il limes coloniale italiano e il ruolo (inesplorato) del Club Africano di Napoli. Nuovi cantieri di ricerca: per una lettura decoloniale in archivio

Abstract

In the context of the numerous contributions that emerged in the second half of the 20th century in the international debate that have critically reread – also thanks to postcolonial studies – the processes of colonization, investigating imperialist dynamics from the early modern to the contemporary age, Italian colonialism remains a relatively unexplored field of research, with a few significant exceptions. Most interesting is the underrepresentation of networks active in the city of Naples during the genetic phase of the Italian colonization process. During the liberal age, the city was considered a central node for the Mediterranean projection of the colonial limes, as witnessed by the founding in 1880 of the African Club of Naples (CAafrNA), later to become the African Society of Italy (SAI), namely, the original nucleus of the Society of Geographical and Colonial Studies of Florence, which established itself as an important association of national geography. The contribution aims to explore the unpublished documentary fund of CAafrNA belonging to the SAI archives and kept at the University of Naples “L’Orientale,” still awaiting proper reorganization. The goal of this first probe into sources that are still unexplored is to begin to fill some of the existing gaps in the understanding of Italian colonialism and through the analysis of the crucial role played by Naples as a bridgehead in the Mediterranean between the West and Africa.