Featuring personal albums, photographs, postcards, and maps from the early twentieth century to the Fascist period, drawn from the Harvard Collections, the exhibit investigates the visual, literary and political imaginary that prepared and accompanied Italy’s belated and violent participation in the colonial “scramble for Africa.”

As suggested by the title, the exhibit explores how colonial ideology relies on a notion of Africa as an exceptional territory, beyond legality, and even beyond reality. The notion that “in Africa it is another story” validates both the nineteenth century exoticizing fantasies and the violence of the twentieth century Italian colonial wars. At the same time, the images, words and voices presented in the exhibit remind the postcolonial viewer that the “story” of “Africa” was and is multiple and different.

The exhibit is organized around four themes: exploratory missions; colonial wars; containment of the colonial other through photography; and colonial dominion through architectural and urban planning projects. The archival materials are put into dynamic dialogue with contrasting perspectives taken from literature and popular culture, as well as voices of participants in the colonial adventure, both perpetrators and victims. One aim of the exhibit is to redress the ongoing silence and historical erasure that afflicts this still hidden chapter of Italian history.