This essay focuses on the racialising devices that characterise some Italian colonial novels. Specifically, it looks at two novels of the late 1920s – Enrico Cappellina's Un canto nella notte. Romanzo coloniale and Guido Milanesi's La sperduta di Allah – with the aim of highlighting the continuities and discontinuities between the racist models they endorse. A critical close reading of the texts reveals the degree of interconnection between segregationist and inclusivist interpretations of the cross-racial colonial encounter in the first half of the ventennio. With this perspective, the 1936 imperial turning point, even though critical on the institutional level, appears less so in the cultural field of racist production.
