Italo Calvinoʼs Colour Blindness and the Question of Race among Einaudi Intellectuals

Abstract

Italo Calvino is acknowledged as an important voice in post-war Italian literature. Together with other important Einaudi intellectuals, such as Elio Vittorini and Cesare Pavese, Calvino helped shape the narratives around, and the legacy of, the Italian resistance and anti-fascism. Through his work as an editor at Einaudi and his membership of the Communist Party, Calvino was strongly involved in post-war debates on inequality and societal change. This article investigates the connections between these interests of Calvino and important Einaudi intellectuals with reflections on Italy’s colonial past and the struggle for civil rights and racial equality (especially in the United States). The Marxist framework through which Calvino approached these matters made him somewhat colour blind, causing him to erase differences and disregard possible connections between colonial and post-colonial struggles for civil rights.