Through Somali-Italian author Igiaba Scego and Italian photographer Rino Bianchi’s Rome Denied. Postcolonial Itineraries in The City / Roma Negata. Percorsi postcoloniali nella città (2014), we will discuss the use of photography in the Italian decolonial mapping and critical odonomastic movement. During the past decade, historians, scholars, filmmakers, artists, and collectives of activists alike have revisited narratives, archives, and testimonies to debunk the colonial myth of the “Italiani, brava gente” (“Italians, decent people”) and disclose the reality of Italian colonial past. Thanks to a hybrid approach of visual, postcolonial, and feminist analyses, we will examine five of the thirteen photographs contained in the book to discover the process of space and history reappropriation in which the decolonized female subjects can impose their gaze and impress their truths both on the cityscape and in the spectator’s eyes.

Dr. Chiara Falangola obtained her Laurea Quadriennale in French Studies at La Sapienza University of Rome, Italy (2006) and her PhD in French Studies at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver (2013). Before joining UNB, she was Assistant and then Associate Professor of French and Italian Studies at Rhode Island College in Providence (2014 to 2021) and Lecturer of Italian at the University of British Columbia (2021 to 2023). Her research and teaching interests lie in the aesthetics of disaster (literature, graphic novels and cinema), 20th- and 21st-century French and Francophone literatures, theory of the novel, women and feminist literature, Francophone and Italian postcolonial studies, and critical pedagogy.