13.Colonial Legacies in Family-Making and Family-Breaking: Carla Macoggi’s Memoirs as Semi-Autobiography
by Carla Cornette
Kkeywa: Storia di una bimba meticcia (2011) and La nemesi della rossa (2012) constitute the sequential memoirs of Carla Macoggi, Ethiopian-Italian author and attorney. They recount the case of an adoption of a meticcia/mixed-race Ethiopian-Italian child by a white Italian businesswoman in the 1970s in Addis Abeba and their subsequent migration to Italy. This analysis situates race and gender at the intersection of Critical Adoption Studies and Postcolonial Theory to reveal the persistence of the colonial practices of madamato marital arrangements and the disenfranchisement of the meticci children of Italian men and indigenous women in the former colonies which culminates in the transracial,