American Innocence on the Color Line: Henry James’s and Curzio Malaparte’s Racialised Italy

We propose an interconnected reading of James’s The Golden Bowl and Malaparte’s La pelle. Both negotiate a shared cultural repertoire: one revolving around a historically problematic, racially uncertain Italian whiteness. This problematic Italian whiteness is confronted with a white US American identity, thus also staging and problematising the trope of American innocence. Both illuminate a historical context of racialisation discourses between the latter half of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th.