The Gaze and the Guilt. Reconsidering Ennio Flaiano's Tempo di uccidere and the Master-Slave Dialectic in Colonial Context
2016
Abstrakt
The article proposes a new reading of Flaiano's Tempo di uccidere with the intent to overcome the limits of previous interpretations, most of which either neglect the importance of the African context, or stigmatize the novel on the basis of a hasty comparison with the recent postcolonial literature. I will demonstrate that the master-slave dialectic, which Sartre and Fanon, in the same years, were rethinking in order to interpret and subvert the relation between colonizers and colonized, allows us to grasp the novel's dynamics and to assess its originality with regard to its political background (post-fascist Italy) and cultural context (deeply influenced by French existentialism).