Brown babies' in postwar Europe : the Italian case

Abstract

By drawing on a variety of different sources (some of them archives only recently made available to the public), the lecture will engage the general issue of the persistence of the idea of race and its close entanglement with the idea of nation in post-1945 Europe by focusing on the racialization of the “brown babies,” namely the children of European women and non-white Allied soldiers born on the continent during and right after the war. Similarly to what happened in Great Britain and Germany in the same years, these children in Italy were considered a “problem” in spite of their small numbers. Because of their origin, but especially because of the color of their skin, they generally were seen as not really belonging in the nation. Fantasies concerning their disappearance paralleled the elaboration of plans for their transfer to other countries. The Italian case, however, had its own specificity, namely the extent to which prominent figures of the Catholic Church and more generally of the Catholic world, often former supporters of fascism and of colonialism, were involved in trying to “solve” this so-called “problem” in the early Cold War years.