Unlike the UK, France and the other nations with a colonial background, the Italian discourse on migration has neglected the experience of waves of immigrants from the former colonies. Notwithstanding the precious historiographical research [see Del Boca, Labanca, Triulzi], there has been scant interest in cultural identities, and their construction, related to colonial and postcolonial policies. This neglect of cultural identity is not surprising, given the fact that historians of education have almost never addressedthe issue of education in the Italian colonies.

My research is carried out in the unexplored territory of the complex relations between colonial history, education, and cultural identity. This corresponds to the increasing contemporary and international educational interest in analysing the composite forms of cultural identities as partly constituted by educational experiences and asymmetric power relationships. Indeed, according to the research I have so far done, meticci (the derogative label that the Italian fascist regime imposed on the children born of an indigenous woman and a white man) and Italosomali (particular identity that people born of a Somali woman and an Italian man during the A.F.I.S. period have chosen for themselves once arrived in Italy) appear to be by-product of the education in the colonies.

In particular, my paper focuses on the transition from the forced identity of meticcio to the self-ascribed identity of Italosomalo, as a claim to legitimation and recognition of ethnic difference and to being a component of the Italian history. These two categories allow asking a host of queries about continuities and transformations in the postcolonial world and the relevance of education: What are the long-distance effects of the colonial education? How does a composite community imagine and describe itself to others and to itself? How does it understand its educational past, envisage its future and live in the present?

The main aim of this study is to document and examine the social and educational processes and representations that have shaped Italosomali children and adults attitudes over time and suggest that they continue to have consequences for identity in the globalized world (such as in the Italian context) of the 21^st century. This paper also aims to provide a critical perspective on some postcolonial researchers’ conceptualizations, in particular their definition of people of “mixed racial heritage” as marginal of two cultures and two societies, in both of which they would be aliens.

The conceptual framework is mainly inspired by Ogbu’s and Butler’s idea of agency, that does not speak only about resistance, but about people able to enact strategies within their complex social and cultural background.

I see my research as an intercultural and social justice-oriented exercise consisting in learning to read “our” history and present through other’s eyes, giving voice to alternative “truths” until now silenced by the dominant narratives of history, bringing to surface the powerful dynamics within and between specific manifestations of oppression, and reflecting on the long-distance effects of “our” education.The history and the present condition of the Italosomali are analyzed and interpreted through these lenses.

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