Black Lives Matter: Italy and the Legacy of Italian Colonialism

When was racism born in Italy? Who are the Afro-Italian activists nowadays? What is the composition and history of Black Italy? Is there any collective memory of the Italian past? On which battle is Black activism in Italy engaged?

This multi-media lecture aims to offer the audience a cultural and semantic framework to interpret racism in Italy, considering it is structurally and statistically different from American systemic racism, within the larger context of past Italian colonialism.

Join the lecture at the time of the event here, via Zoom.

Featured speaker

Fred Kuwornu is an activist-producer-writer-director, born and raised in Italy and now based in Brooklyn. He graduated from the university of Bologna with a Laurea in political science. He has since produced several works with his production company, Struggle Filmworks.

In 2008, after working with the production crew of Spike Lee for the film Miracle at St. Anna, Fred researched the unknown story of the 92nd Infantry “Buffalo Soldiers” Division, and discovered the journey taken by the real 92nd veterans, an African-American segregated combat unit that fought in Europe during WW II.

He produced and directed the award-winning documentary Inside Buffalo (“Best Documentary” at the Black Berlin International Cinema Festival). In 2012, he released 18 IUS SOLI, a documentary that examines multiculturalism in Italy through the lenses of the G2, the second-generation Italians, young men and women born in Italy by immigrant parents, who are denied Italian citizenship because the Italian law is based on Ius sanguinis.

In 2016, he produced Blaxploitalian, another documentary for social change this time focused on media representation. In this work, Fred uncovers the hidden story of African, African-American and Caribbean actors in Italian cinema.

With the web series Blaq•IT, started in 2020, Fred Kuwornu experiments with the hybridization of documentary and the esthetic storytelling of social media. The series appears on various platforms, such as Facebook, Instagram, Youtube and others.

This event is sponsored by the Istituto Italiano di Cultura.