Colonial Violence and the Roots of Fascist Writing

Abstract

Abstract This article explores the connection between fascist writing and modern colonialism through the analysis of several works produced by F.T. Marinetti, Rafael Sánchez Mazas, and Ernst Jünger. Each of them visited Africa at some point in their lives. Marinetti spent fall 1911 in Libya, where he reported on the Turco-Italian War; his chronicles were collected in La Bataille de Tripoli (1912). Sánchez Mazas was sent to Morocco in fall 1921 as the war correspondent for El pueblo vasco, a daily that published his series of articles - “La campaña de África” - on the Rif War. Jünger went to Algeria in 1913 to receive training as a new member of the French Foreign Legion, an episode that he would novelize in Afrikanische Spiele (1936). This study contends that the stay of these three writers in Africa was an event that, together with other factors, determined their fascism.