Thanks to extensive research conducted in museums, libraries and archives, the book reconstructs, for the first time in an organic manner, the formation, articulation and post-colonial events of these collections.
The variety, consistency and genesis of the collections are intertwined with the crucial role played by curators, officials and scientists.
The analysis of the complex relationship between objects, knowledge, colonial policies and institutions between the liberal period, the Fascist period and the Republican era reveals an essential component of the historical experience of colonialism.
Museums also represent a precious observatory to grasp its impact on the paths of national history and to dialogue with the most recent debates on the material heritage of colonialism in the Italy of the present time.
Beatrice Falcucci has been a research fellow at the University of L’Aquila and has carried out research periods at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris, the Netherlands Institute in Rome (KNIR) and the Centre for the Study of Cultural Memory of the School of Advanced Study in London.
She is currently a post-doctoral researcher ‘Juan de la Cierva’ at Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona.
Falcucci also wrote (in English) A repository of colonial intervisuality and memory: the Colonial Museum in Rome (2023) and (in Italian) Una ‚reliquia colonialeʻ – Le apparizioni degli occhiali di Omar al-Mukhtar tra Roma e Tripoli (2024)
