Would you let your son marry Lola?
Download this article by Professor Jessica L. Harris
Download this article by Professor Jessica L. Harris
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PUBLISHED
August 18, 2025
This article examines the Italian film career of African American singer, dancer, and actress Lola Falana, analyzing the intersection of race, gender, and American cultural capital in a country noted for its, as Sandra Ponzanesi defines it, “colonial unconscious.”
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This mental state allowed for the racist discourse and discriminatory practices from the Fascist era to persist in the new Republic. However, the ongoing Cold War and strong attraction of American popular culture in Italy granted Falana a certain cultural capital, allowing her to be depicted in a rather progressive way in comparison to her female African counterparts. But, she still did not escape the denigrating racialized stereotypes and rhetoric of Italian colonialism. Drawing on Italian visual media and American and Italian print archival material, the article illustrates how Falana represents American (cultural) imperialism yet latent Fascist colonial racist rhetoric.
Wikipedia
Photo by Jad N. Nammour
Jessica L. Harris is Assistant Professor (Associate Professor, effective September 1, 2025) in the Department of History at St. John’s University. Her current project, Black America and Italy: African American Women in Post-Fascist Italian Culture, explores the place of female Blackness in post-Fascist and postcolonial Italy through the examination of the positionality of African American female entertainers in Italy in the second half of the twentieth century. For this project, she was awarded the 2024 Rome Prize in Modern Italian Studies at the American Academy in Rome. Her publications include Italian Women’s Experiences with American Consumer Culture, 1945-1975: The Italian Mrs. Consumer (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020) and articles in Annali d’Italianistica, Modern Italy, and Imago. Studi di cinema e media.
This article was published in the journal Annali d’Italianistica.