Out of Time: History, Presence, and the Departure of the Italians of Egypt, 1933-present

Abstract

This dissertation studies the experiences of an Italian emigrant and colonial community in the shifting political regimes of the mid-twentieth century Mediterranean. It addresses the question of how the sense of community that emerged since the 1930s among “the Italians of Egypt” (gli italiani d’Egitto) positioned them within a constellation of competing geo-political domains. The community of over 60,000 Italian residents on the eve of the Second World War encompassed a wide range of national, ethnic, and religious identities that were brought closer together through their temporal and spatial displacement. Juxtaposing archival and oral-historical sources, this dissertation documents how the Italians of Egypt engaged national and imperial narratives by anticipating, experiencing, and remembering their departure from Egypt, processes which in turn constituted their sense of belonging to history. The structure of this dissertation works against teleological readings of history. Chapters one and two address imagined futures of the Italians of Egypt in the context of the imperial aspirations of the Fascist regime in the early 1930s and during the Second World War. Chapters three and four cover the events and legal regimes in Egypt and Italy through which departing Italians became “repatriates” and “national refugees” after the Second World War and into the 1960s. These historiographical chapters are interwoven with oral-historical vignettes that illustrate how repatriated Italians of Egypt in today’s Italy revisit their lived experiences. The vignettes examine the community’s origins, the consequences of political transformation in postwar Egypt, and the experiences of departure from Egypt and arrival in Italy. Italian communities in colonial settings in general, and those within the shifting borders of the Mediterranean in particular, remain marginal to scholarly work on colonial communities. This dissertation contributes to recent scholarship by providing a key example of the complex unraveling of the colonial Mediterranean. Demonstrating how departures and arrivals contoured the history of the Italians of Egypt, "Out of Time" underscores the importance of regional politics in shaping historical consciousness in the Mediterranean. In doing so, it challenges traditional periodization and studies that conceptually divide Europe from the Middle East and North Africa.