In Race, Nation and Gender in Modern Italy, Gaia Giuliani continues to enrich the theorising of the intersection of the categories of race, gender, class, and sexuality in the process of constructing the Italian national identity, through a transdisciplinary approach centered on visuality. The book takes an intersectional perspective and is structured in three parts, subdivided into a total of six chapters, which offer a broad and rigorous analysis of the sources through three historical periods: the Liberal era, Fascism and the Republic. Starting with two episodes of racist violence that took place in Italy in 2013 and in 2016, the introduction positions the research within the Italian postcolonial sociocultural and political context, showing how racist meanings and discursive practices, bound to the concept of race, are tightly connected with the material lives of the subjects seen as ‘Others’. The author focuses on the structure of Italian racism, which proves to be a ‘re-articulation of the colonial archive’ (p. 5), and identifies visuality as the place of reproduction of ‘figures of race’ (p. 5) – images of colonial origin that assign specific meanings to specific bodies and construct them as ‘Others’.

In the first section, focused on the Liberal and Fascist periods, Giuliani analyses the construction of Italian racial identity as white in relation to the process of nation formation and colonial expansion overseas. Through a wide range of sources (legal and academic texts, literature, works of art, photographs, films and popular culture), the author shows how the construction of Italian whiteness, according to a process of hetero-referential racialisation, gave way, after 1936, to a prevailing racial self-identification with whiteness and with the position of hegemony assigned to it. The author also demonstrates how this process is strongly interconnected with the construction of gender. During the Fascist era, in particular, the concepts of masculinity and femininity were rearticulated in relation to (and in opposition to) colonised men and women, while the social role of women was bound to a patriarchal model of the family. The new ideal models of the Italian man – virile, patriotic and belligerent – and woman – mother, wife and caregiver – were assigned the role of protecting and reproducing the colour of the nation.

The second section explores the construction of white hegemonic masculinity from the 1950s to the 1970s. The analysis of the selected visual sources (films and documentaries by Pier Paolo Pasolini, Gualtiero Jacopetti, Franco Prosperi, and Roberto Rossellini, docufiction, mondo movies and soft-porn films) shows how various forms of white masculinity maintain and reinforce their hegemonic position through affirmation of (their own) ‘right to look’ as a normative instrument of vision and interpretation of reality. The hegemonic character of the white gaze is reinforced through the construction of a hypersexualised and exotic black femininity, as shown through some soft-porn films of the 1970s whose protagonists were the Eritrean Italian actress Zeudi Araya and the Indonesian-Dutch-Italian actress Laura Gemser. These works only appear to overturn the observation perspective and the terms within which the interracial relationship between the white male protagonist and the black female protagonist is structured; in reality, they repropose the colonial stereotype of the Black Venus and reaffirm white hegemony ‘through a complex interweaving of invisibilisation …, concealment …, and hypervisibilisation’ (p. 150).

The third section presents a complex analysis of the articulation of race, gender and class within advertising, television shows, and journalistic discourse, from the 1980s to the present day. While advertisements for coffee, chocolate, and liquorice reveal a connection between blackness and food that turns the black female body into a product to be consumed and creates – through an act of symbolic cannibalism – its inclusion ‘in the imagined space of whiteness’ (p. 186), the TV shows selected (Quelli della notte, Indietro tutta!, Drive In) enact a (self-)representation of Southern Italy (and of the North opposed to it), alternating the deconstruction of stereotypes with exoticising and othering dynamics. The TV shows Alle falde del Kilimangiaro and Dalla vostra parte, on the other hand, produce a discourse that perpetuates processes of racialisation and fosters a racist imaginary of black people, migrants and Roma, represented in accordance with the figures of the ‘good savage, the criminal, the victim, and the Other-within’ (p. 211). The last part of this section is devoted to the Cameroonian Italian pop singer Cécile (Cécile Vanessa Ngo Noug) and the Ghanaian Italian rapper Bello Figo Gu (Paul Yaboah), examining the counter-visual representation that Cécile opposes to the white hegemonic gaze on black female bodies, and the desecrating and provocative character of Bello Figo.

In conclusion, Race, Nation and Gender in Modern Italy is a brilliant and solid contribution to research on the articulation of race, gender and class in the formation of modern states and, more generally, to the debate on Italian racism and sexism. The book's innovation lies particularly in the selection of under-explored sources and in the use of visuality as an investigative perspective. Through Giuliani's analysis of ‘popular’ visual products, she reveals the functioning of the ‘scopic regime’ which establishes the subjects who can access the ‘right to look’ and those who, instead, remain invisible. At the same time, the author shows how this regime is challenged by the counter-narratives of the subjects historically excluded from the right to self-represent their identities.