5th ISA Forum of Sociology (6-11 July 2025)

What does decolonization mean in contexts where colonial history has been forgotten or even never acknowledged? Taking off from the case of Italy, a country with a failed but brutal colonial history, we aim with this session to address silenced and invisible narratives and histories of colonization. The Italian example will provide a starting point for a broader discussion aimed at addressing other experiences. Started in the late 19th century and re-boosted by Mussolini during the age of the so-called Fascist empire, Italian colonialism reached out to various parts of the Mediterranean and beyond provoking great damage in the territories in which it penetrated. Nevertheless, its memory faded along with the failure of fascism, reinterpreted, and washed away under the narrative of “The Good Italian”. So what is the role and presence of these memories today? How is it experienced today among both the colonizers and the colonized?

We contend that visual culture can provide a terrain for exploring these silenced narratives. With the present session, we, therefore, want to attract all those scholars who have researched these topics and together reflect on the characteristics of silenced colonial stories through a focus on visual information and visual methods. We want to reflect on the extent to which a visual perspective may grant us an opportunity to renew a debate that is blooming in the social sciences. Can visual studies help us re-think conventional assumptions regarding the nature of colonialism? We welcome presentations coming from any (post)colonial context.