Italians in Colonial Tunisia: Social and Cultural Implications
The phenomenon is illustrated by presenting the case of the author’s family. Memoirs reported in literary or academic works and historical documentation are therefore combined with first-hand personal memoirs and the visual archive (mainly photographs) stored by the family itself.
Family archives represent a hybrid material that is difficult to catalog (Woodham et al., 2017), but they prove to be extremely useful for bringing back to life memories forgotten or silenced by conventional historical narratives. Family memories (Appadurai 2013) are also a site to produce shared meanings and social regulation, through which individuals make sense of their experiences and knowledge, inscribing them into a broader frame of reference (Neumann 1996). Essentially, they allow us to question the relationship between intentionality, identity representations, actors' horizons of meaning, and broader historical-social processes.
The memory of Italians in Tunisia has long been removed from national historical accounts and imagination, leading to its transmission being relegated to informal and family circuits, which are necessarily idiosyncratic and fragmented. Today, as part of a broader rediscovery of Italy's colonial past, Italians from Tunisia and their descendants are reclaiming their history and identity in the public sphere. Amid failed attempts at Mediterranean integration, where North African neighbors are increasingly viewed as a threat, recovering these memories highlights the vital interdependence and exchange between the two shores—an essential connection, despite the legacy of colonial exploitation.