As an undergraduate student studying Romance Studies concentrating in Portuguese and Spanish, I was able to engage with the content of Being Black in Venice in a more meaningful way. In class, we discuss race, class, and family in contemporary literature, how these literatures relate to migration, generations, and history, and debate translation’s role and accuracy, or lack thereof, in conveying these messages. Even though the event focused more on the visual arts, the themes of class were still evident to me, especially the discussions we have had about the legacy of Italian colonialism and the impact of nationalist myths. The Miracle of the Cross at the Bridge of San Lorenzo reminded me of The Four Moors Fountain, that we had discussed in class as a colonial relic and was mentioned in Scego’s The Color Line.
(Bandini & Tacca, 1626)
The discussion turned to the irony behind the marginalization of Black figures in art: their obvious presence, yet their presumed insignificance due to their placement in the marginal spaces of the art. Black figures in these works are presented as fixtures of daily life, an argument that is emphasized later in the discussion when traditional Venetian candleholders and doorknobs were displayed and evaluated. These works, while offensive, can still be found in Italian homes, and are synonymous to the American lawn jockeys that remain in many American households to this day.
The event closed with a discussion about works being done to re-memorialize history, a large overarching theme of our course. A desire to deconstruct national myths to expose the fatal colonial lies that allow much of the -isms to prevail in our modern societies. The event and our class agree that the silence imposed on communities and carried throughout the generations to be the cause for much of the continuance of these falsities. We have discussed in great length the importance of literary truth through the novels we have read in class, discussing how literature can be used as a tool to tell history and contextualize it. Literature provides a space for cultural reckoning, evading the clinical-ness associated with non-fiction, while leveraging historical contexts to help an audience arrive to a desired argument. During the event, the work of artists like Kiluanji Kia Henda were presented to demonstrate the current state of the colonial deconstruction movement in Europe amongst second-generation African immigrant populations. Artists like Henda strive to decolonize the beloved Italian art cannons that much of the nationalist sentiments of Italy were built on. They understand that the silent presence of Black figures within these cannons allows for stories to be written over their lives, bolstering the harmful rhetoric that marginalizes them.
Not to be cliché, by every single class has been an eye-opening experience for me. The majority of the discussions that I have been exposed to on race and colonialism have been focused on the United States and England, respectively. To see these legacies at work in other spaces, and how ignorance at the micro-level bolster institutional atrocities, has educated me as not only a student, but as a global citizen.
