«Sotto il segno di Roma»: l'educazione coloniale e la Collezione Marzocco per la Gioventù Araba del Littorio

This paper engages with the debate over the history of Italian racism. Specifically, it focuses on the racializing strategies employed by a series of short children’s stories (Collezione Marzocco per la Gioventù Araba del Littorio), published in 1939 and targeted for a colonial audience. After a brief sketch of the role and functions of colonial literature, on the one hand, and of Gioventù Araba del Littorio, on the other, the article will dwell into the racist ideological standpoints put forward in these twenty short stories. It will then be argued that the pedagogical strategies there endorsed opened up to potential fractures within the Imperial racism of the late Thirties.