Ottoman Empire and Italian imperialistic discourse How the Italian literature represented the Ottoman rule in Albania in order to legitimate an imperialistic discourse

Dalmazzo, Pietro

Abstract

Although Italian colonialism was born late and died early, the Italian colonial ambitions emerged promptly after the process of unification. The eastern Adriatic constituted one of the areas subjected to the Italian expansionist policies. Those policies, which evolved in the first decade of the 20th century through diplomacy and attempts to develop political and cultural influence, accompanied a literary production about this region constituted by journalistic reportages, geographical and ethnographical accounts of travel and explorations. This literature, mainly published in the years before the 1st World War, covered a role in legitimizing and giving literary consistency to the Italian expansionist discourse towards the eastern Adriatic.
The paper aims to analyse how the Italian literature of the early 20th century represented the Ottoman rule in Albania to understand the presence of a colonial attitude within these representations, and to look at how this attitude was legitimated and deployed through their texts.
Secondly, it focuses on the role covered by the representation of the Ottoman Empire in the Italian literary narration developed about Albania, which constituted the basis of the subsequent colonial representation of these territories during the Fascist period. The paper will investigate these issues by evaluating how this region was perceived and discursively constructed in colonial terms, focusing on which narrative and descriptive patterns were involved in the literary representation of Albanian social and territorial spaces. The paper seeks to develop this analysis through a focus on the works of two authors: Vico Mantegazza, a Journalist who worked as a reporter from the Balkans and the African colonies, and Antonio Baldacci, a geographer, botanist and ethnographer who focused mainly on the Balkan region.

Citation

Dalmazzo, P. (2022, August). Ottoman Empire and Italian imperialistic discourse How the Italian literature represented the Ottoman rule in Albania in order to legitimate an imperialistic discourse. Paper presented at TIOL 2. Seminar Travellers in Ottoman Lands: the Balkans, Anatolia and Beyond, Sarajevo

• Presentation Conference Type: Conference Paper (unpublished)
• Conference Name: TIOL 2. Seminar Travellers in Ottoman Lands: the Balkans, Anatolia and Beyond
• Start Date: Aug 24, 2022
• End Date: Aug 26, 2022
• Deposit Date: Jan 30, 2024
• Public URL: https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1759163