‘We have a Common Past, a Common Present and a Common Future’. Postcolonial Gendered Memories of the Eritrean Diaspora

Domenica Ghidei Biidu; Barbara De Vivo; Elisabetta Hagos; Sabrina Marchetti

doi:10.18352/incontri.9144

Author(s)

Domenica Ghidei Biidu Indipendent scholar
Barbara De Vivo Università degli Studi di Roma, "La Sapienza"
Elisabetta Hagos /
Sabrina Marchetti Robert Schuman Centre of the European University Institute, Florence

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.18352/incontri.9144

Keywords:

Eritrea, women, memory, oral history, migration

Abstract

Questo articolo si basa su di un’intervista condotta da Sabrina Marchetti e Barbara De Vivo con Domenica Ghidei Biidu e Elisabetta Hagos nel 2009. In quanto componenti della diaspora eritrea in Europa, Ghidei Biidu e Hagos contribuiscono con questa intervista alla memoria della dominazione coloniale italiana nel Corno d’Africa sulla base del patrimonio di conoscenze che entrambe hanno ereditato dalle proprie famiglie.

L’intervista si sviluppa lungo delle linee di analisi e riflessione che rendono con efficacia l’importanza della dimensione di genere nel movimento nazionalista eritreo e nelle migrazioni di tipo postcoloniale e diasporico, così come nel processo di memorizzazione che le ha accompagnate. S’illustrano inoltre la dimensione culturale e quella simbolica della relazione attuale fra popolazioni ex colonizzate ed ex colonizzatrici. Infine, quest’intervista rappresenta un contributo originale nell’ottica del ‘fare storia’ rispetto al ruolo particolare che hanno avuto le donne eritree nei periodi di transizione politica e nelle connessioni fra Eritrea, Etiopia e Italia.

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Author Biographies

Domenica Ghidei Biidu, Indipendent scholar

Domenica Ghidei Biidu is an independent scholar. A lawyer, she is currently HumanRights Commissioner at the Netherlands Institute of Human Rights. The past seven years she has been an Equal Treatment Commissioner for the Dutch Equal Treatment Commission. Inter alia she is Executive board member of Equinet, the Europeannetwork of Equality Bodies, and she is member of The Hague Process on Refugees andMigration, and Chair of the Board of the African Diaspora Policy Centre. She is also member of the Selection Committee for the Netherlands Judiciary body. In the past she has worked as a consultant on diversity management.
Barbara De Vivo, Università degli Studi di Roma, "La Sapienza"

Barbara De Vivo holds a Ph.D. in Philology, Linguistic and Literature from theUniversity of Rome, Sapienza, with a dissertation titled La letteratura postcolonialeitaliana. Strategie di auto-rappresentazione in tre scrittrici africane italiane (2011). Her fields of interest include postcolonial and migration studies, gender studies, queer theory, whiteness studies, and she is particularly interested in the intersectionbetween sexuality/queerness and postcoloniality. She is currently conducting research on the racialization of desire and queerness in Italian contemporary postcolonial literature.
Elisabetta Hagos, /

Elisabetta Hagos was born in October 1978 in Rome to an Eritrean mother and a Tigray father. She spent her early years in a Catholic boarding school in Rome. At the age of 20 she decided to move to U.K., in London, where she worked and studied for six years. Once graduated at Plymouth University, she returned to her first adoptive country, Italy. In Rome, she became actively involved with the antiracist movement. She currently lives in Bologna.
Sabrina Marchetti, Robert Schuman Centre of the European University Institute, Florence

Sabrina Marchetti is currently Marie Curie post-doctoral fellow at the Rober tSchuman Centre of the European University Institute in Florence. She has mainly specialised on issues of gender and migration, with a specific focus on the question of migrant domestic and care work. She has done extensive research on Eritrean migration to Italy for the writing of her PhD dissertation titled Paid domestic labourand postcoloniality: Narratives of Eritrean and Afro-Surinamese migrant women (Utrecht University, 2010) and the book Le ragazze di Asmara: Lavoro domestico emigrazione postcoloniale in Italia (Ediesse, 2011).