Imperial reproductions: The circulation of colonial images across popular genres and media in the 1920s and 1930s

The Fascist phase of the Italian colonial experience was characterized by the diffusion of colonial discourses and imagery across Italian culture. Significantly, it was frequent for the same people to produce texts belonging to diverse genres, often cutting across different media and irrespective of distinctions between elite and popular audiences. Concentrating on representations of the East African territories which were eventually to constitute the Africa Orientale Italiana (AOI), the article analyses the way in which a selected number of images of the colonies spread across different genres and media, arguing in favour of an interdisciplinary approach to colonial processes of representation. Textual and visual mappings of Africa inscribed its territories with European symbols, value systems and signifiers. Geographers and travel writers, in particular, had a fundamental role in creating not only the physical but also the mental space for colonization. They enacted the transformation of East Africa from the dangerous and unmapped setting of the heroic acts of individual explorers to the stage for a collective colonial effort. In their footsteps there followed the discourse of tourism and the tourist industry, which was meant to integrate the image of the colonies with that of the peninsula.