Fascist Imperialism Research Articles

Dealing with the Material Legacies of Italian Fascist Colonialism in Post-Communist Tirana

Albania was Italy’s most short-lived colony, under official fascist control only from the Italian invasion in 1939 until the collapse of Mussolini’s regime in 1943. However, although the fascist occupation was brief, there had been a significant Italian involvement in Albania since 1923. Thus, the influence of Fascism on Albania and especially on the capital city of Tirana was immense, not least in the areas of urban planning and architecture, most of which was retained intact by the Communist dictatorship which ruled from 1944 to 1990. This essay investigates the afterlives of this fascist-era architecture in post-Communist Tirana. In the panoply of Italy’s imperial territories, Albania was unique in passing from a fascist dictatorship to a Communist one and this trajectory provides important nuance to the current debates regarding the legacies of fascist heritage in the 75 years since the regime’s fall and especially in the twenty-first century. This essay pays particular attention to the years 2016–2020 during which two notable examples of fascist-era architecture in Tirana, namely the city’s football stadium and the National Theatre, have been at the centre of major political and public debates about the future of the city, the country and its governance, asking what these recent cases can reveal about the memory of fascist imperialism in post-Communist, democratic Albania and contributing to ongoing debates about the management, treatment and reception of the material legacies of Italian colonialism more broadly.

Imperial Remnants of a Contested Alpine Border Region: Encountering Bolzano’s Ambiguous Monuments

Italian cities are full of public inscriptions and monuments that praise not only fascism but also its brutal expansionist wars. This situation is especially true in Bolzano, the capital of a formerly contested border region in the north of the country, where such symbols were crucial to claim political and cultural domination over conquered territories – not only in the Mediterranean and Africa, but also within Italy’s own national borders. This essay examines monuments, street names and other material legacies of fascist imperialism in Bolzano and reflects on the meaning given to them by the fascist regime at the time of their erection. It reveals why these symbols were placed at specific points in the city as imperial landmarks and questions the regime’s representative intentions behind it. This essay intends to provide a historical starting point for an overall examination of imperial monuments in Bolzano and, based on this, to enable research on their reception history in further studies. To this end, it examines articles from fascist South Tyrolean newspapers reporting on the inauguration ceremonies of the monuments. In addition, fascist laws and city government protocols provide information about the political ethos under which the regime erected them. Finally, the imperial remnant’s symbolic content will be analysed and compared with the research literature on Italian colonialism and its wars of aggression.

Italian Fascists and the Rewriting of American History

Italian Fascists and the Rewriting of American History

Disrupted and Unsettled: An Introduction to Monuments, Memorials, and Italian Migrations

Disrupted and Unsettled: An Introduction to Monuments, Memorials, and Italian Migrations

Masculinity, Industrial Education and Fascism in Egypt

Abstract Starting from the premise that school is a ‘major site of masculinity formation’ (Connell, 1996), this article studies the construction of boyhood in the industrial schools of the Salesian mission in Egypt between 1900 and 1939. Analysis of the teaching tools and methods, and of the processes of conformity used in these schools run by Italian missionaries, reveals that they became forums for confrontation and negotiation between different models of masculinity. This article uses the case study of the Salesian schools to shed new light on the interconnections between missionary programmes, fascist imperialism and schooling strategies of the pupils and their families. Ultimately, it seeks to demonstrate how missionary schools contributed to the gendered construction of technical expertise and industrial education in Egypt.

Fascism, Imperialism and International Law: An Arch Met a Motorway and the Rest is History . . .

AbstractWhat would happen to our understanding of international law and its relationship with violence if we collapsed the distinction between our supposedly post-colonial ‘present’ and its colonial ‘past’; between the sovereign spaces of the twenty-first century global order, and the integrated, hierarchical space of fascist imperialism? I respond to this question through an investigation into the physical contours of a precise ‘imperial location’: 30°31′00″N, 18°34′00″E. These co-ordinates refer to a point on the sea-edge of the Sirtica that is occupied today by the Ra's Lanuf oil refinery, one of Libya's three most important such facilities. In the late 1930s, however, during Libya's period of fascist colonial rule, this was the point at which a state-of-the-art motorway, the Via litoranea libica, was crossed by a giant triumphal arch, the Arco dei Fileni. Through a chronotopic reading of the temporal, spatial and interpellative aspects of this point, its architecture and its history, I suggest that fascist lawyers, officials and intellectuals accepted a horrifying truth about the relationship between international law and violence – a relationship that twenty-first century doctrinal international law is loath to confront, concerning the inherently expansionist logic of the sovereign state, and the inevitably hierarchical ordering of the ‘international community’ which stems from it.

When fascism met empire in Japanese-occupied Manchuria

AbstractFocusing on the case of Japanese-occupied Manchuria, this article asks what set Japan, Germany, and Italy apart from other empires during the ‘fascist moment’ from the aftermath of the First World War to the defeat of the Axis powers in 1945. While scholars have examined the politics and culture of fascism in metropolitan Japan, there is virtually no literature on fascist imperialism. Indeed, the consensus term is ‘wartime empire’ and the dominant framework is of an empire mobilized for total war. One of the goals is to think through what the concept ‘fascist imperialism’ might mean and what the Japanese case might contribute to its definition. Detailed comparison with Germany and Italy is beyond the scope of this article, which builds a definition of fascism around four core elements drawn from the Japanese case: the ideology of Asianism and its vision for Japanese leadership over a regional movement of anti-colonial nationalisms; hyper-militarism that went well beyond military imperialism pursued since the late nineteenth century and that constituted a new celebration of military action and the aesthetics of violence; red peril thinking that propelled the creation of a police state targeting communist intellectuals, politicians, and labour activists within the archipelago as well as communist nationalists in the empire; and radical statism, which signified the turn to the state as the spear tip and staging ground of action to address the crisis. All four dimensions of fascism in Japan intensified in the process of territorial expansion from 1931 to 1945, and linked transformations across the nation-state-empire.

Editorial – Axis empires: towards a global history of fascist imperialism

Editorial – Axis empires: towards a global history of fascist imperialism

Axis Empires. Toward a Global History of Fascist Imperialism

The international workshop organized by Daniel Hedinger and Reto Hofmann and financed by the Center for Advanced Studies at Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich brought scholars working on Axis countries together in order to explore viable approaches for a global history of fascist imperialism. The major questions addressed the colony–metropole relationship and its role in the radicalization process as well as the ways in which fascist empires learned from the imperial strategies used both by their allies and by their liberal-empire counterparts. In two days, the participants discussed how, when, and where these empires intersected, thereby investigating ideology, culture, empire-building processes and (self) perception.

Italian Liberal Imperialism in China: A Review of the State of the Field

AbstractThe story of Italian imperialism in China is an almost forgotten one. Few know that the Kingdom of Italy was on the verge of war with the Qing Empire in 1899 and that, following its participation in the Boxer War a year later, it acquired a concession in Tianjin, which it kept until 1947. This nearly forgotten episode is important, however, for understanding Italian imperialism as a whole. For a number of years, research of Italian imperialist past has tended to pay more attention to fascist imperialism at the expense of liberal imperialism, at times making Italian imperialism in general appear as an outgrowth of fascism. This is dangerously misleading, as it was imperialism of the liberal era that first revealed expansionistic tendencies that would characterise Italian fascism half a century later. The historical importance of Italian liberal imperialism as a precursor of fascist imperialism and an important early signal of totalitarian proclivities of Italian political elites needs, therefore, to be critically reappraised.

Transformations of fascist imperialism: Greece from Le soldatesse (1965) to Mediterraneo (1991)

Abstract The article demonstrates the power of sociopolitical and cultural contexts that dictated the interpretations of fascist imperialism in the two most important films dealing with the wartime occupation of Greece. Analysis of both films is positioned in relation to the history of the wartime occupation, when Italian soldiers were moved by racist assumptions, rejected Greek culture and willingly perpetrated crimes against the Greek people. From war’s end to the early 1960s, official memory of brutal fascist imperialism had been obscured by a powerful myth that the Italian people had been good anti-fascists and sympathetic victims during World War II. But events of the early 1960s created a political crisis that demanded re-evaluation of the power and dangers posed by Italian fascism. The article explores the means by which Valerio Zurlini’s 1965 Le soldatesse/The Camp Followers attempted to awaken national memory of imperial exploitation and inspire in audiences both a powerful collective guilt and consciousness of the urgent necessity to combat neo-fascism. The article also exposes the influence of the sexual revolution on this film’s depiction of consensual heterosexual sex as the primary mechanism for peaceful Italo–Greek relations. It was this sensual approach to empire and not the anti-neo-fascist political mission that tied The Camp Followers to Gabriele Salvatores’ 1991 Mediterraneo. Inspired by the new political apathy and consumer culture of the 1980s and early 1990s, Mediterraneo created an imaginary fascist empire devoid of racism and the ideological commitments that divided Italian from Greek. The new film created the possibility of an Italian imperialism defined by leisure, an alteration of history that could only seem reasonable in a world redefined by sensual consumerism. The stark differences between these two films’ depictions of Italians in the fascist empire reflects a larger transformation of Italian national identity.

Good workers: television documentary, migration and the Italian nation, 1956–1964

This paper examines a series of documentaries produced in the period between 1956 and 1964 that document the activities of Italian migrants around the world (a corpus of more than 100 films and programmes altogether). These films, which record the dedicated and laborious nature of Italians around the globe, play a double role. On the one hand, they serve as a necessary adjunct to the establishment of a ‘labour culture’ in Italy, a central aspect of the compromise between labour unrest and the demands of capital in which the figure of the worker is continually praised. At the same time, they serve to obscure and rewrite the Italian collective memory concerning the legacy of Fascist imperialism and Italian involvement in colonial expansion, in the process recasting the Italian coloniser as the ‘good worker’.

Giuliano Procacci storico del Novecento

Giuliano Procacci, historian of the XX century - Intellectual inquisitiveness and ingenuity in exploring new research paths denote Procacci’s scholarly work on modern and contemporary history. The essay deals with the author’s investigation into contemporary history issues. It ranges from his studies on the industrial worker and farmer movement in Italy, the Communist party in the Soviet Union and the Internationales’ struggle for peace and against fascist imperialism, to his latest works about twentieth century history focusing on globalization processes and the building of both the states’ national identity and the one of the ruling classes. In the appendix the outline of Procacci’s 1962 presentation to a meeting on fascism organized by Istituto Gramsci and later cancelled.

National Soldiers and the War on Cities

In an inconspicuous footnote towards the end of his Prison Notebooks, Antonio Gramsci presents us with a startling observation. Writing in a very different time and place, he suggests that a political-geographic rift had emerged between urbanism and cosmopolitanism on the one hand, and ruralism and nationalism on the other. Gramsci offers the intriguing thought that, “these conflicting attitudes can in a sense be seen as two sides of the coin of fascist imperialism.” While ‘fascist’ may not be an apt term to describe contemporary imperialism, the rest of the equation seems strangely fitting. I characterize this observation as ‘startling’ in part because it speaks to a formidable challenge of politics and geography in our own time, but also because it remains an overlooked footnote. This paper takes Gramsci’s observation seriously. In fact, my analysis is crafted in the shadows of this footnote, and in its interstices with another. The second note not a literal footnote like the first is instead a social ‘fact’ that has largely been treated as a footnote, a point of marginal importance. This second footnote tells us that the militaries of advanced capitalist nations with voluntary forces are made up overwhelmingly of rural soldiers, and that rural areas have become the heartland of militarism and ‘authentic’ patriotism. I will suggest that this second footnote is extraordinarily important in that it is a constitutive element of contemporary forms of organized violence. Far from a banal detail of ‘location’, urban/rural geographies of militarism and military service are a key to the historical geographies of citizenship that constitute our violent present.