Italian Culture

ISSN: (Print) (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/yitc20

Imag(in)Ing Blackness in Italy: Redactions,

Presence, and Media in Antonio Dikele Distefano’s
Work

Michela Ardizzoni

To cite this article: Michela Ardizzoni (2021) Imag(in)Ing Blackness in Italy: Redactions,
Presence, and Media in Antonio Dikele Distefano’s Work, Italian Culture, 39:2, 223-239, DOI:
10.1080/01614622.2021.2014663

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/01614622.2021.2014663

Published online: 31 Jan 2022.

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ITALIAN CULTURE, Vol. 39 No. 2, September 2021, 223–239

Imag(in)Ing Blackness in Italy:

Redactions, Presence, and Media in
Antonio Dikele Distefano’s Work
MICHELA ARDIZZONI
University of Colorado Boulder, Boulder, CO, USA

This article examines the transmedia work of writer and media maker
Antonio Dikele Distefano through an analysis of the politics and aesthetics
of Blackness and its (in)visibilities in Italy. Specifically this paper considers
how this artist inhabits and disrupts existing narratives of belonging and
negotiates the racialized terms of the Italian imaginary.

KEYWORDS blackness, transmedia, body, presence, race

Introduction
The Italian television program Tale e quale (Exactly the same), which airs on the
public network RAI, is a variety show that features Italian celebrities who
compete to do the impressions of Italian and international singers. The episode
broadcast on Nov. 18, 2020 catalyzed a barrage of reactions on social media
because of the use of blackface by one of the contestants. For his impression of
Italian rapper Ghali, actor Sergio Muniz wore a dreadlock wig and blackface in
a problematic attempt to capture the Tunisian origins of the Milanese artist.
Praised by the judges and certainly encouraged by the producers, Muniz
appeared unaware of the racist subtext of this cultural practice, which has been
adopted liberally on Italian television and in Italian cinema. In fact, the same
variety show, which launched in 2012, had featured blackface several times
throughout the years, as Italian artists attempted to imitate Beyonc
e, Aretha
Franklin, James Brown, and others. Despite a heightened sensitivity to racism
and race relations in response to Black Lives Matter, which manifested in
numerous protests in main urban areas, Italian public television failed to enact
an ethical practice of representation. As a network that largely marginalizes
Italian minorities, RAI seemed at best oblivious to the significance of racial
representations in an age of media ubiquity. When asked about their adoption
of blackface, Tale e quale producers and host declined to comment, while Muniz

© 2022 American Association for Italian Studies DOI: 10.1080/01614622.2021.2014663

224 M. ARDIZZONI

invoked the trite justification that he was aiming to impersonate Ghali at his
best (“tale e quale,” exactly as he is, as the show title avows). Given the show’s
questionable choices, in November 2020, Ghali took to social media to air his
concerns about the relentless emphasis on skin color as necessary practice of
imitation. In a short video, Ghali responded to some of his followers who
blamed him for being too sensitive and playing the victim: “Non c’e bisogno del
blackface per imitare me o altri artisti. Potete dirmi che esagero, ma siamo
ormai gli unici a usare il blackface, l’unico paese. La comunita nera continua a
chiedere ai media di smetterla, ma non cambia niente. E  la seconda volta che mi
imitate cosı. Non sono offeso, veramente, ma non rido neppure.” Ghali
continued by contextualizing the use of blackface in the history of the United
States and inviting his viewers to watch Raoul Peck’s 2016 documentary I Am
Not Your Negro, available on Netflix Italia.
This incident, the latest example of the use of blackface in Italian media at the
time of this writing, exposes the lack of cultural sensitivity in the representation
of Black and brown bodies, pointing to the tendency of Italian media outlets to
discount the historical roots of certain representational tropes. The widespread
use of blackface and the insistence on its innocuousness unmask an overt
disregard, a refusal to acknowledge the country’s colonial past and an abiding
ignorance about the mediated racialization of representation in practices such as
blackface. Some online comments, which quickly dismissed Ghali’s riposte and
emphasized instead the facetious tone of the program, bespoke the kind of
ideological erasure to which Black and brown bodies are often subjected in
Italian public discourse. The myopic obstinacy that places skin color at the
center of every representational and discursive practice results in both the
marginalization of non-white bodies and their exoticization, which becomes
unmistakably clear in representations of female bodies. In 2021, non-white
bodies remain perceived as irrevocably “Other,” as in not truly Italian, not
genuinely local, not quite as worthy. The long history of non-white Italians,1
their contributions to Italian culture, and their integral, complicated sense of
italianit
a are effaced in a populist narrative that privileges whiteness as a
normative standard. Thus, the use of blackface in programs like Tale e quale
resolidifies the nexus between whiteness and Italianness, denying the very
existence of Black and brown Italians. In this context, and in light of Italy’s
violent colonial history in Libya and the Horn of Africa, it bears repeating that
flippant representations like the one featured in the Tale e quale can never be
lighthearted and are instead disingenuous masquerades that speak to deeper
cultural convictions.
I began this article by recounting this episode of blackface on RAI because it
allows us to reflect on the presence, absence, and erasures of Black Italians in
mainstream media and invites an interrogation of the patterns of (in)visibility
that Black and brown bodies are afforded in the national imaginary. To map the
positions of Black Italians in the media, this article discusses the work of
Antonio Dikele Distefano, a multidimensional, vibrant artist whose work
 IMAG(IN)ING BLACKNESS IN ITALY 225

crosses different media platforms and reclaims visual and discursive spaces
where the experiences of “other,” non-white Italians are validated. My analysis
of Distefano’s transmedia2 work, which ranges from books, social media and
YouTube to television and Netflix, engages three main lines of inquiry. First,
given the fairly homogeneous mediascape outlined above, how does Distefano’s
work intervene in the self-perception of Italy as white? And how does his
production challenge the narrative that casts Black Italians (and all racialized
others) as always newcomers and migrants? As poet and scholar SA Smythe
argues in their study of Black italianita, “[w]here people of African descent are
concerned, Italy has often cast them as perpetual ‘newcomers,’ a false belief still
present at the nation’s core” (Smythe 2019: 11). The vision of Italy as a white,
monochromatic nation warrants what historian Paul Gilroy calls “the
reintroduction of history,” a “not minimal aim” in this context since it
acknowledges that racism “rests on the ability to contain blacks in the present,
to repress and to deny the past” (Gilroy 1987: 12). This proclivity to contain
Italianness within a white frame reveals an insistence both on the ephemerality
of Black bodies in the country’s poetic imagination and on the evanescence of
the Black past, which is seen as disconnected from the Black present and the
Italian past alike.
The second line of inquiry that I wish to explore here relates to the kind of
“wake work” that scholar Christina Sharpe invokes in her poignant study In the
Wake: On Blackness and Being (Sharpe 2016). Here Sharpe defines “wake
work” as the work that “we Black people do in the face of our ongoing death,
and the ways we insist life into the present” (qtd. in Mitter 2017). In Sharpe’s
lucid reflections, wake work becomes a necessary lens through which to
reimagine life after slavery:
we join the wake with work in order that we might make the wake and wake work
our analytic, we might continue to imagine new ways to live in the wake of slavery,
in slavery’s afterlives, to survive (and more) the afterlife of property. In short, I
mean wake work to be a mode of inhabiting and rupturing this episteme with our
known lived and un/imaginable lives. With that analytic we might imagine
otherwise from what we know now in the wake of slavery. (18)
Following Sharpe, I ask: how does Distefano engage in wake work? What kind
of wake work is necessary in the Italian context in order to “insist” Black life
into Italian national discourse? Through an analysis of Distefano’s media
practices, I examine how this artist inhabits and disrupts existing narratives of
belonging. When asked about the meaning of Black Italianness, Distefano curtly
replied: “E un dato di fatto essere italiano nero. Spesso in Italia si dimentica che
essere neri significa essere italiani e automaticamente significa anche non essere
italiano” (Coppola 2017). The seemingly paradoxical positioning of Black
Italians requires local Black artists to engage in a sort of wake work that allows
them to reclaim and reimagine their presence in Italy, while probing (and
ultimately disrupting) the homogenizing structures that force them to the
226 M. ARDIZZONI

margins. In this sense, an analysis of the work of Black Italian artists as a

practice of wake work also allows us to rethink the meaning and role of the
archive in Italy. What kind of archival erasures and absences are revived in the
work of artists like Distefano?
The last line of inquiry that I will explore in this analysis has to do with the
transmedia approach Distefano takes to expand the reach of his projects; in this
context, the audience is conceived more in terms of the eclectic nature of his
public than in terms of the numerical impacts that usually drive media analyses.
As media scholar Henry Jenkins reminds us, a transmedia approach to
storytelling is characterized by different points of entry aiming at different
publics, making it an “ideal aesthetic form for an era of collective intelligence”
(Jenkins 2007). In the current Italian media milieu, transmediality appears to be
an expedient strategy allowing emerging artists to bypass the rigid structures of
mainstream television and reach instead the protean publics that use and
consume their work. It is indeed through direct contact with their audiences on
social media platforms that artists like Distefano succeed in incorporating the
sensibilities of a country in flux and, eventually, transition to mainstream media
through new formats on Netflix and Sky Italia.
Born in 1992 in Busto Arsizio, in the region of Lombardy, Distefano was later
raised some two hundred miles to the South in the city of Ravenna, the quiet
Italian province that features prominently in his novels and forms the backdrop
for some of his characters’ lives. Growing up between his parents’ Angolan
culture and his own Italian grounding, Distefano found in writing an outlet to
express the complexity and richness of his own background as well as the
ephemerality and uncertainty of adolescence and young adulthood: “Il bisogno
di scrivere nasce dalla mia poca abilita a raccontare ad alta voce quello che ho
dentro. Spesso anche chi mi sta vicino scopre che ho sofferto solo dopo avermi
letto. Scrivere e prima di tutto un mezzo per sfogare quello che provo” (Milani
2018). It is indeed through writing that Distefano broke into the Italian cultural
scene in 2014, when, at the age of twenty-two, he self-published his first novel
Fuori piove, dentro pure, passo a prenderti? As an unknown, first-time author
from the Italian provinces, Distefano saw self-publishing as his only option.
During the first three months of publication, Distefano’s ebook recorded 16,000
downloads and attracted the country’s largest publishing company, Mondadori,
which offered him a contract to “officially publish” the book in 2015. Since
then, all of Distefano’s books have been published by Mondadori, selling several
hundreds of thousand copies in the fairly small Italian book market and topping
the Amazon charts. While the publication of his 2014 novel was Distefano’s
d
ebut in the public literary world, his writing, like much of his work, takes
place across media spaces and is accordingly crafted around the affordances of
each media tool. Instagram, a platform that thrives on images, is used by
Distefano as a space for words. Many of the images that he posts on his
Instagram account are of texts: some handwritten, some typed, some excerpted
from his books. While some posts promote an upcoming project (his Netflix
 IMAG(IN)ING BLACKNESS IN ITALY 227

series Zero or his latest book), others read as intimate reflections on life and
relationships. Through these photographed words, Distefano challenges the
normative dichotomy between text and images, which has reflected the
functions of social networking services, such as Twitter and Instagram. In these
instances, the visuality of words does not encourage the reader to linger on the
vibrancy of language; rather, words are shown in minimalist snapshots that
foreground Distefano’s truncated narratives. The intermediality of the posts,
which originate in books or personal journals and cross over to social media, is
reflective of Distefano’s mediatic approach to a nonlinear, diffusive form of
storytelling, a necessary blueprint to “insist” Black life into the Italian present.

Scripting Unexceptional Bodies

For Distefano, long-form writing has followed from an imperative to fictionalize
his own experience as a Black Italian youth. In doing so, he has also pushed for
a level of visibility for non-white Italians that is rarely found in contemporary
literature or mainstream media. This is a form of visibility that refuses to resort
to processes of spectacularization, exoticization, commiseration, or alienation as
means of allowing Black and brown lives into Italian narrative. His five books
(Fuori piove, dentro pure, passo a prenderti? [Distefano 2015]; Prima o poi ci
abbracceremo [Distefano 2016]; Chi sta male non lo dice [Distefano 2017]; Non
ho mai avuto la mia eta [Distefano 2018a]; and Bozze [Distefano 2018b]) are
windows onto the daily interactions among friends and between lovers, as they
reflect on the same existential questions that enthrall youth worldwide: love,
friendship, trust, family, dreams, and the future. The success of Distefano’s
novels and their relevance for this analysis lie in their lack of exceptionalism, a
quality that takes on different subtleties in the context of Black Italy. Rather
than marking Distefano’s oeuvre as trite and forgettable, the very normalcy of
his narratives points to their importance in a cultural context where Black
bodies have been depicted as other and therefore anomalous. From the
threatening characterizations of Black men as brutes and predators during
colonial times to the objectified images of Black female bodies more recently, the
Black body has been inevitably marked by alterity, standing outside the norms
of Italianness. To this extent, the centrality of its presence in public discourse is
directly connected to its color and its perceived inconsistency with the idealized
whiteness of “real” Italians. In her book Race, Nation and Gender in Modern
Italy (Giuliani 2019), postcolonial studies scholar Gaia Giuliani argues that the
racialization of Black and brown bodies in the Italian imaginary operates as a
narrative device to bolster the intrinsic idea of whiteness: “The racialised bodies
of today, like those inherited from the past (southern Italians, Jews, the Roma,
as well as the colonised), are constructed not only to discursively discriminate or
justify exploitation and differential inclusion but also to construe by contrast the
idea of whiteness— … the normative charge that structures and gives substance
and justification to the racialised social hierarchy that is variously reproduced in
228 M. ARDIZZONI

the very dis-homogeneous Italian society” (Giuliani 2019: 6). As such, Black
bodies are objectified as either entities to be feared and marginalized, survivors
to be succored and pitied, or extraordinary individuals to be praised for their
uniqueness and elevated as symbols of success. In all of these iterations, the
Black body is positioned at either end of a broad spectrum that preserves
whiteness as the normative standard. In these narrative and visual
representations, Black and brown bodies are not allowed the degree of
normality that would be granted to white bodies. It is, in fact, some form of
exceptionalism that gives Black bodies visibility in the national imagination.
When visibility and presence are the prerogatives solely of exceptional Black and
brown bodies or normative white bodies, writing on mundane, flawed, and
ultimately human Black Italian youth becomes an act of disruption. It compels
Black Italianness into the present by imaging Black bodies without redactions.
As Sharpe brilliantly writes, “[e]ach time I read that word imaging I read it
doubly. That is, I read the word as imaging, ‘to make a representation of the
external form of,’ and also as imagining, ‘to form a mental image or concept of;
to suppose or assume; the ability to form mental images of things that either are
not physically present or have never been conceived or created by others’”
(Sharpe 2016: 111). In this sense, the characters in Distefano’s novels navigate
the relationship between imaging and imagining by insisting on the possibility of
being Black and Italian, at once reflecting present experiences in Italy and
mapping a future still inconceivable in public, media representations.
In his literary debut, Distefano approaches storytelling from an autobiographical
point of view: Fuori piove, dentro pure, passo a prenderti? is a stream-of-
consciousness narration of the relationship between a Black young man and his
white girlfriend, a love that is ultimately smothered by her family’s racial
discrimination. As Distefano confirmed in numerous interviews, the story, set in
Ravenna, reflects his own past experiences and indeed reads like a series of
personal reflections that are tenuously held together by the leitmotif of love. Told
from the perspective of Antonio, the male protagonist, the story provides glimpses
into a short-lived relationship, which is reconstructed for the reader through a
series of nonlinear narratives organized in brief chapters. The language echoes the
syncopated writing of social media posts: short sentences, evocative images, and a
constant rhythmic flow that is sustained throughout the book. The following
introspective paragraph, for instance, is illustrative of Distefano’s style and its
relationship to media:
A volte ti ci ritrovi dentro anche se ti eri promesso che a te non sarebbe mai potuto
accadere. Quant’e facile parlare? E  troppo comodo dare solo consigli. Ci sono cose,
sensazioni, che il mondo non capira, che devi tenere per te, che semplicemente devi
risolvere da solo, mostrandoti sereno, anche quando fuori piove. Perch
e non puoi
essere felice ed essere il pi
u forte, nella vita tocca scegliere.
Distefano’s paragraphs follow the cadenced style of the spoken word, with brief
sentences, rhetorical questions, and stock phrases. The rhythm of his writing
 IMAG(IN)ING BLACKNESS IN ITALY 229

conforms to the pace of social media posts, characterized by quick observations,

short affective reflections, and an overall style that compels immediate reading.
The narrative in Fuori piove, dentro pure, passo a prenderti? is organized
through twenty-two short chapters, each titled after a song. The playlist that
frames the narrative and invites the reader to listen to each piece while reading
the book is eclectic and reflects Distefano’s wide-ranging musical taste: from
pop, soul, and reggae to the music of singer-songwriters and hip hop, with lyrics
in Italian, English, or French. Soon after the book’s publication, fans used
platforms like Spotify and YouTube to (re)create the Fuori piove soundtrack by
adding music videos or simple tracks of the playlist that orchestrates the story.
In doing so, they engaged in a practice of intermediality that was already
suggested in the novel itself. Never a unit on its own, the book here gives rise to
an intermedial engagement with the text that expands to various media
platforms (Instagram, YouTube, Spotify) and cuts across aural and
visual dimensions.
As mentioned above, the transmedial nature of Distefano’s work proves a
necessary tactic to intervene in the representation of Black Italianness in
contemporary culture. As such, these inter- and transmedial strategies operate
on two distinct but concomitant axes: on the one hand, this approach heightens
the visibility of Afro-Italians on a plethora of media platforms, thus reaching a
diversified audience; on the other hand, it foregrounds the common experiences
of Black and brown bodies across national lines. For instance, some of the
tracks included in the playlist echo the sense of inbetweenness and frustration
expressed by Antonio as he navigates his interracial relationships. In “Jour de
paix,” the French hip-hop group 113 raps: “Ta couleur de peau peut faire de toi
un
etranger/Tu trouves ça normal?/Moi j’me sens chez moi n’importe o u/Citoyen
du monde avec peu d’moyens mais libre au moins” (Your skin color can turn
you into a foreigner/Do you find this normal?/I feel at home anywhere/world
citizen with few means but free at least). And in “Changes,” Tupac Shakur
reflects on widespread racism and the flickering light of hope: “I see no changes,
all I see is racist faces/Misplaced hate makes disgrace to races/We under, I
wonder what it takes to make this/One better place, let’s erase the wasted.”
Thus, while the plots of Fuori piove and Distefano’s other novels are deeply
rooted in the Italian provinces and mirror the social practices shared by most
Italian youth, these stories cross over national boundaries by suggesting the
possibility of a collective experience of Blackness in white-majority
communities. The balance between the local and the global is preserved in the
playlist, which features quintessential Italian artists, like Arisa, Tiziano Ferro,
and Fabrizio De Andr
e, alongside international names, such as Bob Marley,
Coldplay, and John Legend. In this sense, the playlist adds a different,
unexpected layer to the notion of Black Italianness presented in the narrative by
situating Blackness within the broader context of African diasporic communities
in Europe and beyond. This move necessarily invites a more nuanced
imagination of race that looks inward and refuses to understand Black
230 M. ARDIZZONI

Italianness exclusively through US conceptions of race. As Black feminist

theorist Tina Campt suggests, it is
important to understand the emerging interest in Black Europe as part of a larger
project of decentering the United States in the field of African diaspora studies in
the twenty-first century. Parochializing U.S. models of race in relation to the equally
complex forms of racial as well as gendered subject formation experienced by Black
populations beyond the Americas and in Europe in particular is in no way a new
project; it is the continuation of an older and ongoing tradition of the study of the
African diaspora as an explicitly transnational formation that refuses to privilege
any particular location over another (Campt 2019: 140).
Never completely disconnected from the US cultural framework, Black and
brown bodies in contemporary Italy (and in Distefano’s work) are nonetheless
grounded in the Italian public imaginary and remain inevitably impacted by the
country’s colonial past (Ben-Ghiat and Fuller 2016; Andall and Duncan 2005;
Novati 2008).

Countering Transmedia Erasures

A few years before the publication of his first novel, Distefano gained some
popularity as an emergent, teen rapper under the pseudonym of Nashy. In the
late 2000s, Nashy was rapping about his marginalization, growing up as a Black
young man in a mostly white province. In “Non ti piaccio,” for example, Nashy
denounces preppy kids for using a variety of epithets against him (foreigner,
terrone, slave, or Negro) and pledges the retribution by Black Italians (“un
giorno noi avremo il mondo in mano”) . In a sense, music has functioned as a
leitmotif in Distefano’s artistic production and has allowed him to diversify his
reach. In the early 2010s, in fact, he ventured into a business enterprise with
Ghali, the renowned Lombard rapper mentioned above, to create a multi-
purpose brand called Sto Movement, which included a music label, an online
magazine, and a clothing line. The collaboration between Ghali and Distefano
lasted a few years until the two artists agreed to follow different paths and
embark on divergent projects.
In 2016, Distefano founded an online music magazine, Esse Magazine (www.
essemagazine.it), focused on news and long-form stories about Italian urban
music and culture. The magazine’s mission statement reads: “Da sempre attento
alle nuove tendenze, Esse Magazine si e contraddistinto fin dalla sua nascita per
uno spiccato uso dei nuovi media, con il lancio di format video di qualita
inedita e un racconto multimediale attento alle dinamiche dei social network.”
A multimedia approach and a consistent reliance on social media are at the
heart of this project, which has developed into a major hub for urban and hip
hop music culture in Italy. The magazine was originally created as Instagram
content and still uses this platform (@essemagazine) to reach its younger
audiences: photographs are usually supplemented with long captions and
 IMAG(IN)ING BLACKNESS IN ITALY 231

occasionally invite the public to join in the discussion. The magazine’s website,
by contrast, features extensive interviews with promising artists, like eighteen-
year-old Anna, and well-known names, such as Mondo Marcio and Capo Plaza.
The platform operates as a magnet for a variety of news about Italian hip-hop,
following a fairly conventional format involving short articles, music videos, and
social media posts. In this way, Esse Magazine differentiates itself from other
similar platforms only through its content and its focus on urban and hip-hop
culture. The aesthetics and the format of the magazine are not unlike those of
others in Italy and other countries.
The YouTube series Basement Caf
e, sponsored by coffee giant Lavazza,
originated as part of Esse Magazine and presents an innovative format. The
series, which debuted in October 2018 and was inspired by the French series
Clique,3 features long interviews, ranging from thirty to ninety minutes, with
Italian rappers, hip-hop producers, and, more recently, singers, journalists, and
other public figures. The interviews take place in an actual basement, a
somewhat futuristic setting with blue lights and decor and a large neon sign
advertising the series’s name and sponsor. The initial idea behind Basement Caf
e
was the insistence on long-form interviews with the main protagonists of the
Italian urban music scene, highlighting the importance of in-depth conversations
and challenging prevailing views about the short attention span of young
audiences. In an episode of Marco Montemagno’s web series,4 Distefano
explains his intention to provide a space where rappers could speak more freely
and at greater length than in mainstream media, where the interactions mainly
revolve around a few trite topics, like drugs, violence, or tattoos (“4 chiacchiere
con Antonio Dikele Distefano” 2019). Each episode of Basement Caf
e features two
rappers who are invited to reflect on their favorite films and the centrality of
cinema in their lives and their art. The series’s description foregrounds the
intermediality of its format: “Basement Caf
e is the format that brings out the
intimate connection between rap and cinema, demonstrating how art is the ground
and starting point to create further artistic expressions. The format relies on a
conversation among Italian artists and Antonio Dikele Distefano and uses clips of
auteur films to draw parallels with important moments in the history of Italian
rap.” The emphasis on rap, seen here as the most relevant music scene for the
younger generation, has been tempered somewhat over the years, as the series has
slowly included other public figures among its guests; in fact, while the series’s first
season focused exclusively on rappers, by its third only six of the eighteen total
guests were rappers. This shift from an emphatic commitment to Italian hip-hop to
engagement with a more general pool of interviewees—from the worlds of
journalism, music, social media, street art, and gaming—was marked by the
addition of host Sofia Viscardi, a twenty-two-year-old YouTuber-turned-novelist,
who gained popularity through her videos on life as a twenty-something. Rather
than seeing this shift as a move away from the urban music scene, we should note
that the series now offers a framework that positions hip-hop at the heart of
contemporary Italian culture. In doing so, Distefano’s work on music proposes a
232 M. ARDIZZONI

recentering of public culture, framed by the intermediality of current formats and

the complementarity of various media platforms.
Distefano’s writing and media projects redraw the boundaries of
contemporary public culture in Italy by repositioning Black and brown bodies
within them and thereby imagining Black spaces that disrupt existing narratives
of belonging. In her study of the African diaspora in Italy, Africana Studies
scholar Heather Merrill contends: “Black spaces are where one practices daily
acts of insurgency, ‘fugitivity,’ and subterfuge in an anti-black environment.
… For many African descent people in Italy, Black spaces are the fulcrum of a
Black radicalism dedicated to social survival, justice, and transformation”
(Merrill 2018: 57). By transforming the place and space of Black Italians,
Distefano envisions the possibility of a more inclusive sense of italianita, one
where skin color does not thwart affinity or affiliation. The transmedia
approach embraced in this kind of work provides the apposite multipronged
strategy to penetrate the inaccessible and anachronistic fences that barricade
popular notions of Italianness and that instrumentalize those processes of
racialization tied to the legacy of colonialism (Lombardi-Diop and Romeo 2012;
Chambers 2008; Greene 2012; Nathan 2017). Distefano’s work challenges the
terms of recognition of Black Italian voices: no longer an afterthought or a
footnote in Italian historiography, these voices become here pivotal interlocutors
in today’s conversations on identity, belonging, and social justice. In several
interviews, Distefano reiterates that he is only an individual, a human being who
doesn’t focus too much on his race. In 2016, for instance, he argued:
A me non e stato insegnato l’essere nero. E stato insegnato da voi a chiamarmi cosı.
Cioe, noi usiamo le etichette, le accettiamo, accettiamo di averne una. Noi viviamo
in un Paese che continua a trattarmi come un nero che si sente italiano e non come
un italiano nero. Non hanno ancora capito, tutte queste persone, i miei vicini di
casa, i miei amici, che questa e solo la mia pelle, e che non determina un bel niente.
 un po’ come confondere la vettura con il pilota e credere che siano la stessa cosa,
E
perch
e quando mi dici che ho una bella macchina, non mi stai dicendo che sono
una bella persona, e viceversa. Credo che l’errore sia nel chiamare gli esseri umani
bianchi, neri e gialli. (Antonsich 2016)
Yet despite his refusal to endorse labels and champion specific causes, it is hard
to view and read Distefano’s work in isolation, unplugged from the discourse on
italianit
a and contemporary debates on identity that play out in the media. After
all, Distefano’s racial background is at the heart of his novels and his video
productions, though never the only identity that drives the narrative. As such,
the radicalism of his work in the Italian context relies on its “normalita” (a
noun he uses often to describe his characters) and his insistence on individual
humanity. Distefano’s storytelling and semi-autobiographical work should thus
be understood as a form of “wake work” that counters erasures, silences, and
invisibilities (Sharpe 2014; Sharpe 2016). Here the personal is a reminder of
connections to all Black people in the wake and a quest to “counter the violence
 IMAG(IN)ING BLACKNESS IN ITALY 233

of abstraction” (Hartman 2008: 7). An autobiographical stance, Saidiya

Hartman insists, “is not a personal story that folds onto itself; it’s not about
navel gazing, it’s really about trying to look at historical and social process and
one’s own formation as a window onto social and historical processes, as an
example of them” (Hartman quoted in Sharpe 2016: 8).

Visualizing Blackness without Redactions

The inward process that privileges the personal was integral to Distefano’s
television debut with his program Quello che e. Nuove storie italiane. This
program aired between September and November 2020 on the Feltrinelli-owned
channel laF on the Sky Italia satellite platform and included six episodes. The
press release for the program defines it as “[u]n viaggio nelle storie inedite ed
eccellenti di tanti giovani italiani per raccontare senza stereotipi l’Italia
multiculturale e pluridentitaria di oggi.” Each episode, approximately forty-five
minutes in length, features a renowned public figure, interviewed in the studio
by Distefano, and two pre-recorded stories of ordinary people who work in the
same field as the spotlighted celebrity. In these six episodes, Distefano
interviewed a singer (Elodie), a chef (Misha Sukyas), a rugby player (Maxime
Mbanda), a writer (Esp
erance Hakuzwimana Ripanti), an entrepreneur (Hicham
Ben’Mbarek), and an actor (Mehdi Meskar) on topics like family, roots,
identities, cultures, success, and failure. The title of the program was inspired by
Distefano’s own middle name: Dikele means “what has been” or “what was.”
Focusing on contemporary Italy and its current reality, the producers opted for a
variant of Distefano’s middle name in Quello che e. Each episode opens with the
same introduction: Distefano, dressed casually against a dark background and
surrounded by studio lights, faces the camera as he proclaims: “Sono Antonio
Dikele Distefano. Mi piace scrivere, mi piace la musica e mi piace il mio paese.
Nella lingua dei miei genitori Dikele vuol dire ‘quello che e stato’. Ma io
preferisco parlare di quello che e o di quello che sara.” Adopting the same
interview style employed in Basement Caf
e, Distefano leads the viewer through
narratives of resistance, integration, (in)visibility, discrimination, and growth
that give rise to a picture of Italy as an increasingly multicultural country as well
as a nation still struggling with its colonial past and postcolonial ghosts. As
Lombardi-Diop and Romeo remind us, the work of postcolonial writers
and artists
exposes the sense of uneasiness generated for (white) Italians by the association of
blackness with Italianness. These terms are often conceived as incompatible and
therefore as mutually exclusive. … [I]talianita seems unattainable for black Italians
precisely because national belonging is generally understood in terms of specific
traits (both cultural and biological) that cannot be simply acquired by a perfect
mastery of the language and of the Italian way of life. (Lombardi-Diop and Romeo,
2012: 10)
234 M. ARDIZZONI

The lives explored in Quello che e challenge the racialized and biological
definitions of Italianness that have framed Italian public discourse for decades.
In this way, these personal stories become, as Hartman suggests, “a window
onto” historical and social processes: rather than being discounted, these
narratives weave a visual and discursive fabric of plurality, where Black and
brown lives reclaim their rightful place in the national tale of belonging. Here,
the concept of normality that Distefano explores in his writing is used to
articulate the ordinary lives of his interviewees, where the “ordinary” is not
tantamount to the insignificant or forgettable. In his conversation with Mehdi
Meskar, for instance, Distefano ponders the beauty of the word “normal”
(“Normale e una bellissima parola”) and cites a reflection by Trinidadian-
American activist Stokely Carmichael, who cherished the sense of familiarity
and ordinariness he felt while visiting Guinea for the first time. Meskar, a young
actor of Moroccan descent, expresses his own view of normality as not
“un’eccezione che e meno.” This stance navigates a tightrope between the group
and individual identities that are usually ascribed to Black and brown bodies.
Viewers in Italy are accustomed to seeing Black bodies as forming part of large
groups of migrants, often shot from above on rubber dinghies as they cross the
Mediterranean Sea to reach the Southern Italian coasts (Cava et al. 2018;
Giubilaro 2018; O’Healy 2019; Wood and King 2001). These images, which
populate daily news particularly in the summer months, operate on two levels of
othering: they deprive Black bodies of individuality, and they insist on an idea of
Blackness that is perennially in movement, inextricably subjugated to the “ship”
that, for centuries, has transformed Black and brown bodies into objects of
consumption (Sharpe 2018; Terrefe 2016; Sharpe 2016; Gilroy 1993; Alexander
1994). The corollary of this representation is the conviction that italianita is
fundamentally incongruous with Blackness and that people of African descent
are perpetual newcomers and always in transition (Smythe 2019). It is thus
against this visual and metaphorical background that Distefano’s take on
“normality” and personal storytelling must be understood: as both a reiteration
of Black selfhood and an unapologetic avowal of Black Italianness as a
group identity.
The interplay between the personal and the social unfolds more forcefully in
what is arguably Distefano’s most anticipated media production, his Netflix
series Zero, which was released in April 2021. Loosely based on the
homonymous character in his novel Non ho mai avuto la mia eta, Zero is the
first series to feature an all-Black Italian cast, thereby establishing a direct visual
and discursive connection between Blackness and Italianness. The protagonist of
this fantasy narrative is Zero (Omar), a shy Black Italian teen who is gifted with
a special superpower, invisibility, a talent that allows him to defend his Milanese
neighborhood and develop a set of friendships with other Black Italian youth.
This superpower, says Distefano, allows young Zero “vedere la realta che si cela
dietro all’apparenze delle cose, delle persone e delle relazioni” (Manca 2019).
The series is cowritten by Distefano and award-winning screenwriter Menotti
 IMAG(IN)ING BLACKNESS IN ITALY 235

and features Giuseppe Dave Seke in the lead role. As the first superhero show to
appear as a Netflix Italia original, Zero foregrounds rap and hip-hop as the
central soundtrack of multicultural Milan, the only musical language that can
holistically represent this Black Italian reality, according to Distefano (Obenson
2019). One of the first artists confirming their participation to the soundtrack
was Marracash, a well-established Sicilian rapper and producer, who
participated in Basement Caf
e and recently released his “64 barre di paura” for
Distefano’s series. In a sense, the transmediality of Antonio Dikele Distefano’s
work comes full circle in the production of Zero: inspired by one of his novels,
moving to the beat of his favorite rap, marketed through his Instagram account,
the creation of this show illustrates strategies of visualization that rely on multi-
platform media engagement.
The primacy of Zero in Distefano’s body of work follows from two main
aspects of the series: its contextualization within Italian media and its emphasis
on the interplay between normality and (in)visibility. Upon its release in April,
the series rose to the Top Ten on Netflix Italia and received widespread acclaim
from young audiences. Zero addressed a cultural gap in media representations
of young Italians by simply acknowledging the presence and centrality of Black
Italians. The repositioning of non-white Italians from the margins to the center
of the narrative must be understood in the context of the mainstream media
strategies that I discussed at the beginning of this article. The use of blackface
and other discriminatory practices, such as the persistence of “slanted eye”
gestures made in reference to Asians or Asian Italians in Italian media,5 signals
an obtuse fixation on non-white bodies as an impermanent presence in the
national imaginary, a kind of fleeting presence that will ultimately not alter the
presumed racial homogeneity of the Italian body. Zero intervenes in this
discursive space by positing the tangible possibility that another Italian
socioscape coexists within the myriad local and translocal realities shaping
urban spaces. In the opening scenes of the series, Omar/Zero, a pizza bike
deliveryman, introduces himself as follows: “Sono uno come tanti. Invisibile
come i quartieri dove abitiamo. L’unica cosa che li distingue sono i monumenti.
Al Barrio abbiamo il monumento del migrante. Appropriato … Sono quello
delle pizze. Un modo come un altro per dire nessuno.” As he rides his bike from
his multicultural neighborhood to more upscale parts of Milan, Omar/Zero
establishes a visual ontological connection between his own identity and that of
the city where he grew up and that constitutes an indissoluble part of his being.
The survival of the Barrio neighborhood, threatened by the capitalist
gentrification that is sweeping global metropolises worldwide, becomes Omar’s
raison d’^etre and reveals his ability to become literally invisible to save the life of
his community. The interplay between the literal and metaphorical invisibility of
marginalized bodies is reiterated a few minutes into the first episode, when
Omar gives homeless Dietmar a pizza and cautions him to eat slowly. “Io non
posso morire,” retorts Dietmar. “Sono un supereroe. La gente non fa caso a me.
Cosı io so sempre tutto. Di tutti.” From this moment on, the inventive narrative
236 M. ARDIZZONI

of the series revolves around the articulationn of the protagonist’s normality (his
being “uno come tanti”) as a means of channeling his own special power of
invisibility. In the Barrio and in multicultural Milan, Omar and his group of
friends are portrayed as ordinary Italian youth: while Blackness remains
essential to their individual and social identity, it is never incompatible with
their Milanese roots and never disqualifies them from Italianness.
Like the show’s protagonist, for whom invisibility becomes the ironic route to
being seen, Distefano understands that imaging a present and a future for and
with Black Italians requires a concerted effort to visualize Blackness as a normal
trait of national identity and necessitates a transmedia vision highlighting both
the permanence and the immanence of Black and brown bodies in Italy. In this
regard, Distefano’s work in Zero and Quello che e charts a path toward a new
understanding of the Italian archive as a space that can also become a “Black
space,” a repository of counter-narratives, tales of plurality, and stories of
another way of belonging. For too many centuries, in Western archives,
Hartman argues, “[f]act is simply fiction endorsed with state power … to
maintain a fidelity to a certain set of archival limits” (qtd. in Okeowo 2020).
The richness of Black life has been redacted out of history in Italy, leaving out
personal stories of Black living as annotations on the margins. In Distefano’s
writing and video productions, these stories reclaim their grounding in the
national archive of the present and the future.

Conclusion
In her discussion of Black annotation and Black redaction, Sharpe reflects on the
role of Black images and imaging in the narration of Black lives:
If we understand portraiture to be both the “art of creating portraits” (image and
text) and “graphic and detailed description,” how might we understand a variety of
forms of contemporary Black public image-making in and as refusals to accede to
the optics, the disciplines, and the deathly demands of the antiblack worlds in
which we live, work, and struggle to make visible … all kinds of Black pasts,
presents, and possible futures? Much of the work of Black imaging and the work
that those images do out in the world has been about such imaginings of the
fullness of Black life (Sharpe 2016: 115).
This article has examined contemporary Black public image-making in Italy in
the work of Antonio Dikele Distefano, whose eclectic production spans various
platforms and genres. Distefano’s novels, music magazines, and television
programs mark a crucial intervention in Italian public culture, as they challenge
prevailing understandings of Blackness as alien to the very essence of italianita.
The visual and discursive narratives that I discuss here embrace a conceptual
refusal of a vision of national identity that erases non-white bodies and imagines
a future where Blackness in the Italian context remains evanescent and marginal.
The recentering of Black and brown bodies within the boundaries of accepted
 IMAG(IN)ING BLACKNESS IN ITALY 237

visions of belonging operates a pivotal ideological shift in the representation of

redacted versions of Italianness that exoticize, exhaust, or exclude Black bodies. In
this way, Distefano’s cultural output engages in the kind of “wake work” that
Sharpe sees as necessary to insist Black life into the (Italian) present, “a theory and
a praxis of Black being in diaspora” (Sharpe 2016: 19). Without negating the
horrors of Black death that are omnipresent in the news—from the killing of Black
migrants in the streets to migrants drowning in the sea—Distefano’s work offers an
aesthetic response to the postcolonial silences that muffle Italian histories, and
carves out spaces where an ethics of care (“as in repair, maintenance, attention”)
can thrive, thus advancing “an ethics of being in the wake as consciousness”
(Sharpe 2016: 131). Here, in the Italian context, a practice of care must adapt to
the ossified socio-historical borders and become porous, fluid, breathable. It must
penetrate the social fabric from multiple entry points, urging the public to see the
work of Black Italian imaging as parallel and perpendicular to other mainstream
forms of cultural production. The transmedia strategy adopted by Distefano and
his team involves piecing together the myriad tesserae that compose the portraits of
some Black Italians, with the awareness that, while reflecting a specific socio-
demographic group, these images are not limited to such reflection. This is one of
the first steps toward the formation of a discourse on presence, voice, and visibility
led by Black Italians. As Distefano insists, “vorrei dire all’Italia che il futuro ha
anche la mia faccia.”

Notes
1 For more on this, see: Khouma (2010), Del Boca
(2011), and Lombardi-Diop (2013).
2 Transmedia storytelling is famously defined by
Henry Jenkins as a story unfolding “across
multiple media platforms, with each new text
making a distinctive and valuable contribution
to the whole” (Jenkins 2006:95-96).
3 Clique is a French pop culture television
magazine hosted by Mouloud Achour. It started
in 2013 on Canal þ 4 and has later moved to
YouTube, where it has gained accolades and
featured a variety of national and international
celebrity guests (including Noam Chomsky,
Pharrell, Zin
edine Zidane, and Kanye West,
among others).
4 Marco Montemagno is the founder and CEO of
Blogosfere, Italy's biggest blog network. In
September 2013, he launched his new startup
called SuperSummit, a free live online events
platform where international experts share their
knowledge. Montemagno is also assistant
professor at the Universita Cattolica del Sacro
Cuore in Milan.
5 For more on the representation of Asians and
Asian Italians, see Toshio Miyake (2021) and
Gaoheng Zhang (2016).

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Notes on Contributor
Michela Ardizzoni is an associate professor at the University of Colorado
Boulder. Her research focuses on global media, and media activism, marginality,
race, and feminism. She’s currently working on two book-length projects on the
politics and economics of expendability and the superfluity of vulnerable bodies
as they are represented in contemporary media and on Afro-Italian artists and
their creative practices of resistance.

Correspondence to Michela Ardizzoni. Email: michela.ardizzoni@colorado.edu