Colonial Archives, Memory and Politcal Culture in Italy. The Italo-Eritrean Historical Heritage.

This essay retraces Republican Italy‘s institutional policies with regard to the country‘s colonial history, implemented mainly through the management and control of archives, namely the Historical Archive of the Ministry of Italian Africa (ASMAI) stored at the Historical-Diplomatic Archive of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (ASDMAE). After being unavailable to scholars for decades, in the post-war period the archive was used to promote the development and transmission of a selective memory of the country‘s colonial past. From the second half of the eighties onwards, academic projects focused on recovering sources and making them available to the study of African history have rapidly developed, leading to the publication of inventories and catalogues of sources. On the other hand, short-sighted cultural policies hindered their consultation, progressively underfunding the hosting institutions for reasons that had little or nothing to do with the economic recession. The suppression of IsIAO is an emblematic consequence of twenty years of State ‗disengagement‘, along with the weakening of historiographic disciplines. One of the most prestigious cultural and research centres in the country, home to a significant documentary heritage on Africa, and Eritrea in particular, which long and complex recovery efforts were finally making available to research, was left to die in 2011. Among the equally significant effects of these policies of hindrance, control, and lack of safeguarding and valorisation, is that Italian scholars are moving from the study of sources of the colonial past to researching their origin, their management, and the forms of censorship, control and (mis)use that have marked their existence.