Staging Colonialism in the ‘Other’ Italy. Art and Ethnography at Palermo’s National Exhibition (1891/92)

The article focuses on the National Exhibition held in Palermo in 1891/92, the first organized in a city of the Meridione. The event became for Italy the occasion to stage its recent colonial ambitions and settlement and to celebrate the newly-acquired colony of Eritrea through the arrangement of a fictional village inhabited by a group of people coming from East Africa. Conceptualizing the exhibition as ‘meta-media’, the article examines, through visual and textual materials, some pivotal points of the event: the Belle Arti section, the Mostra Eritrea, and the Mostra Etnografica Siciliana. It traces the developing narratives representing Italy as a colonizing nation and comparing the colonized Eritrean population and Sicilian popular culture, which was also subjected to an internal colonialism. An imperialist attitude toward Sicily emerges within the exhibition and its media. Sicily was perceived as an ‘other’ Italy and became a site of negotiation of internal and external othernesses the nation was facing at that time.