The Image of Africa in Italian Music: From Objecthood to a New Subjectivity

The Image of Africa in Italian Popular Music proposes an innovative, fresh, provocative study, delving inside the common mentality of Italians, through their popular music and the way it has represented Africa and Africans. Italian music has largely followed national history, representing Africa as a mere object, from an inferior and inferiorized land of conquest to a slow process of decolonization of this image, which began around the 1980s and culminated with the irruption of second-generation Afro-Italian rappers into the Italian music scene. Through a careful analysis of the lyrics that is never detached from the historical context and sociological implications, the author shows how it was only with second-generation Afro-Italian rappers that provincial Italy had to come to terms with its present and its past. This musical movement gave rise to cultural, social and political debates that went far beyond the mere fact of music, involving other types of art, as well as proposing changes - such a new citizenship law - that are still struggling to take hold. Far beyond the image of ‘Italians as good people’, these rappers challenge us on a complex and slippery terrain: the construction of a new Italianness, overcoming clichés and stereotypes that one part of the country stubbornly continues to defend.