Through the untold stories of the biracial children born from the encounter between Italian women and Black Allied soldiers in the immediate aftermath of WWII, this original and engaging study sheds lights on the persistence of anti-Black prejudice and ideas of race in democratic Italy, stressing the legacies of colonialist and fascist racism.

Explores the untold stories of biracial children born to Italian women and Black Allied soldiers in the aftermath of World War Two.

Mussolini's Children uses the lens of state-mandated youth culture to analyze the evolution of official racism in Fascist Italy. Between 1922 and 1940, educational institutions designed to mold the minds and bodies of Italy's children between the ages of five and eleven undertook a mission to rejuvenate the Italian race and create a second Roman Empire. This project depended on the twin beliefs that the Italian population did indeed constitute a distinct race and that certain aspects of its moral and physical makeup could be influenced during childhood. Eden K. McLean assembles evidence from state policies, elementary textbooks, pedagogical journals, and other educational materials to illustrate the contours of a Fascist racial ideology as it evolved over eighteen years. Her work explains how the most infamous period of Fascist racism, which began in the summer of 1938 with the publication of the "Manifesto of Race," played a critical part in a more general and long-term Fascist racial program.

The paper addresses the issue of the persistence of the idea of race in its close intersection with ideas of national identities in post-1945 Europe, by looking at the racialization of the children of European women and non-white Allied soldiers born on the continent during and right after the war. The case of Italy is closely examined through a variety of sources, some of which have only recently become available. Similarly to what happened in Great Britain and Germany, in Italy these children were considered a "problem" in spite of their small numbers. Because of their origin, but especially because of the color of their skin, they were often portrayed as alien to the (white) nation. Fantasies concerning their disappearance paralleled the elaboration of plans for their transfer to non-European countries. Italy, however, had its own specificity, namely the extensive role of the Catholic Church and more generally of the Catholic world in the "managing" of these children, as well as in shaping the self-representation of post-fascist Italy as a non-racist country. In fact Catholic racial paternalism was pervasive and underwrote the support that prominent Catholic figures gave to Italy's attempt to hold on to the old colonies in the aftermath of the war.

Under Italian Fascism, African-Italian mulattoes and white Italians living in Egypt posed a particular threat to the pursuit of a homogenous national identity. This book examines novels and films of the period, showing that their attempts at stigmatization were self-undermining, forcing audiences to reassess their collective identity.

Describes the history and nature of the Italian Race Laws during the period (1938-43) when Italy was independent of German control.

Vital Subjects examines cultural production—literature, sociology and public health discourse, and early film—from the years between Unification and the end of the First World War (ca. 1860 and 1920) in order to explore how race and colonialism were integral to modern Italian national culture, rather than a marginal afterthought or a Fascist aberration.

Discloses the richness of ideas and sheds light on the controversy that characterized the transition from fascism to democracy, examining authors, works and memories that were subsequently silenced by Cold War politics. How a shared memory of Fascism and its cultural heritage took shape is still today the most disputed question of modern Italy, crossing the boundaries between academic and public discourse. Against Redemption concentrates on the historical period in which disagreement was at its highest: the transition between the downfall of Mussolini in July 1943 and the victory of the Christian Democrats over the Left in the 1948 general elections. By dispelling the silence around the range of opinion in the years before the ideological struggle fossilized into Cold War oppositions, this book points to early postwar literary practices as the main vehicle for intellectual dissent, shedding new light on the role of cultural policies in institutionalizing collective memory. During Italy’s transition to democracy competing narratives over the recent traumatic past emerged and crystallized, depicting the country’s break with Mussolini’s regime as a political and personal redemption from its politics of exclusion and unrestrained use of violence. Conversely, outstanding authors such as Elsa Morante, Carlo Levi, Alberto Moravia and Curzio Malaparte, in close dialogue with remarkable but now neglected figures, stressed the cultural continuity between the new democracy and Fascism, igniting heated debates from opposite political standpoints. Their works addressed questions such as the working through of national defeat, Italian responsibility in WWII and the Holocaust, revealing how the social, racial, and gender biases that characterized Fascism survived after its demise and haunted the new born democracy.

Based on previously unexplored archival documentation, this book offers the first general overview of the history of Italian eugenics, not limited to the decades of Fascist regime, but instead ranging from the beginning of the 1900s to the first half of the 1970s. The Author discusses several fundamental themes of the comparative history of eugenics: the importance of the Latin eugenic model; the relationship between eugenics and fascism; the influence of Catholicism on the eugenic discourse and the complex links between genetics and eugenics. It examines the Liberal pre-fascist period and the post-WW2 transition from fascist and racial eugenics to medical and human genetics. As far as fascist eugenics is concerned, the book provides a refreshing analysis, considering Italian eugenics as the most important case-study in order to define Latin eugenics as an alternative model to its Anglo-American, German and Scandinavian counterparts. Analyses in detail the nature-nurture debate during the State racist campaign in fascist Italy (1938–1943) as a boundary tool in the contraposition between the different institutional, political and ideological currents of fascist racism.