Ennio Flaiano’s colonialist text, Tempo di uccidere, reveals the prevalence of Manichean essentialisms of gender, culture and location even within a text critical of Fascist colonial discourse and practice. The emblem of Africa as violated woman lies at the center of this (anti)colonial rape allegory, which highlights rhetorically and structurally the disappearance of autonomous female subjectivity behind the various violations perpetrated by Italian and indigenous patriarchies. In the paper, I offer an extended analysis of Flaiano’s text in order to bring into relief the construction and operation of gendered nationalisms—within a significant (and signifying) moment in the history of Italian colonialism—and to reveal the cultural embeddedness of the reductive and manipulative discourses against which later “postcolonial” Italophone African writers inscribe their own texts.
In both propaganda and practice, this colonialism and this nationalism were self-consciously and aggressively masculine, operating upon a dehistoricized, regressive female other, whose very (constructed) passivity (and the increased male desire it incited) were seen as a threat to the purity of the nation and its self-descriptive discourses. Fascist anxiety over Italian racial and cultural “purity” (see the 1937-39 “racial laws”) directly conflicted with, and was fed by, the behaviors of its own soldiers expanding the fatherland through their penetration and domination of Mamma Africa. The complex psychology of the novel reveals the ways in which the Italian colonial adventure in East Africa is a dizzying dance of projected desires and justifications, a continual clearing and revesting of the semic spaces of woman, land, and continent.