A War for Uncle Tom: Slavery and the American Civil War in Italy
This chapter examines the Italian reception of Giuseppe Rota's ballet Bianchi e Neri (Whites and Blacks), an adaptation of Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel Uncle Tom's Cabin. Bianchi e Neri, which presents the dehumanizing brutality of a slaveholding society, became a major point of reference in Italians' critical assessment of life in the United States. Rota's work inspired comments that reveal the passion with which Italians engaged with issues such as race and slavery across the Atlantic. The chapter considers how Bianchi e Neri transformed the ways in which Italians discussed and imagined the New World. It also explores how the debate on the ballet influenced Italian responses to the unfolding American Civil War, and how the abolition of slavery in America intersected with the Unification of Italy as “one single cause”: a struggle for the good of humankind as a whole.