ABSTRACT
Whether in literary expression or in real experience, slavery has never been as present as it is in today’s Europe. The discovery of forced labor conditions of clandestine immigrants in the South of Italy has brought back the issue of slavery from the depth of European history and memory. Migration is in many ways different from slavery, yet the link between the two phenomena becomes obvious when one considers the contemporary cases of enslavement and traffi cking of illegal migrants across Europe’s borders. While modern slavery is a global phenomenon and is certainly not limited to Italy, its implications bear important consequences for the exploration of a discourse around contemporary African diasporic literary production in the peninsula. The historical role of Italy at the outset of the Atlantic slave trade is only one of the many connections between the Mediterranean and the Atlantic. Recent scholarly works on the Atlantic slave system have attempted to internationalize this subject by adopting a global perspective on this complex phenomenon.1 In their effort to explore the distant origins of New World slavery, historians have investigated the many features of medieval and Renaissance Europe that anticipated colonial slavery in the New World. David Brion Davis has argued that there are “strong sequential links” between the Atlantic slave system and the Italian Renaissance.2 Robin Blackburn has affi rmed that sugar production in late medieval Sicily and Andalusia, which had adopted Arab techniques, employed slaves for the cultivation and the processing of sugar cane. Blackburn also noted that “the powers that successfully colonized the Americas had their roots in medieval kingdoms,”3 while Charles Verlinden has demonstrated that medieval entrepreneurs in Venice and Genoa had established slaveholding colonies in the eastern Mediterranean and on the coasts of the Black Sea.4
