Fascist and colonial legacies have been determinant in shaping how Italian colonialism has been narrated in Italy till the late 1960s. This book deals with the complex problem of public memory and discursive amnesia. The detailed research that underpins this book makes it no longer possible to claim that after 1945 there was an absolute and traumatic silence concerning Italy's colonial occupation of North and East Africa. However, the abiding public use of this history confirms the existence of an extremely selective and codified memory of that past. The author shows that colonial discourse persisted in historiography, newspapers, newsreels and film. Popular culture appears intertwined with political and economic interests and the power inscribed in elite and scientific knowledge. While readdressing the often mistaken historical time line that ignores that actual Italian colonial ties did not end with the fall of Fascism, but in 1960 with Somalia becoming independent, this book suggests that a new post Fascist Italian identity was the crucial issue in reappraisals of a national colonial past.

From neorealism's resolve to Berlusconian revisionist melodramas, this book examines cinema's role in constructing memories of Fascist Italy. Italian cinema has both reflected and shaped popular perceptions of Fascism, reinforcing or challenging stereotypes, remembering selectively and silently forgetting the most shameful pages of Italy's history.

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.

It’s Silence, Soundly, It’s Nothing, Seriously and It’s Absence, Presently, continue The ‘It’ Series published by Matador since The Book of It (2010). They constitute another stage in an artistic journey exploring the visual and audial dialectic of mark, word and image that began over 25 years ago. In their aesthetic form the books are a decentred trilogy united together in a new concept of The Bibliograph. All three present this new aesthetic object, which transcends the narrow limits of the academic bibliography. The alphabetical works also share a tripartite structure and identical length. The Bibliograph itself is characterised by its strategic place within each book as a whole as well as by the complex variations in meaning of the dominant motifs – nothing/ness, absence and silence – which recur throughout the alphabetical entries that constitute the elements of each text. It’s Nothing, Seriously, for example, addresses the amusing paradox that so much continues to be written today about – nothing! The aleatory character of the entries in the texts encourage the modern reader to reflect on each theme and to read them in a new way. The reader is invited as well to examine their various inter-textual relations across given conventional boundaries in the arts and sciences at several levels of physical, psychical & social reproduction.

For much of the twentieth century the Mediterranean was a colonized sea. Italy's Sea: Empire and Nation in the Mediterranean (1895-1945) reintegrates Italy, one of the least studied imperial states, into the history of European colonialism. It takes a critical approach to the concept of the Mediterranean in the period of Italian expansion and examines how within and through the Mediterranean Italians navigated issues of race, nation and migration troubling them at home as well as transnational questions about sovereignty, identity, and national belonging created by the decline and collapse of the Ottoman empire in North Africa, the Balkans, and the eastern Mediterranean, or Levant. While most studies of Italian colonialism center on the encounter in Africa, Italy's Sea describes another set of colonial identities that accrued in and around the Aegean region of the Mediterranean, ones linked not to resettlement projects or to the rhetoric of reclaiming Roman empire, but to cosmopolitan imaginaries of Magna Graecia, the medieval Christian crusades, the Venetian and Genoese maritime empires, and finally, of religious diversity and transnational Levantine Jewish communities that could help render cultural and political connections between the Italian nation at home and the overseas empire in the Mediterranean. Using postcolonial critique to interpret local archival and oral sources as well as Italian colonial literature, film, architecture, and urban planning, the book brings to life a history of mediterraneita or Mediterraneanness in Italian culture, one with both liberal and fascist associations, and enriches our understanding of how contemporary Italy-as well as Greece-may imagine their relationships to Europe and the Mediterranean today. --

Ruth Ben-Ghiat provides the first in-depth study of feature and documentary films produced under the auspices of Mussolini’s government that took as their subjects or settings Italy’s African and Balkan colonies. These "empire films" were Italy's entry into an international market for the exotic. The films engaged its most experienced and cosmopolitan directors (Augusto Genina, Mario Camerini) as well as new filmmakers (Roberto Rossellini) who would make their marks in the postwar years. Ben-Ghiat sees these films as part of the aesthetic development that would lead to neo-realism. Shot in Libya, Somalia, and Ethiopia, these movies reinforced Fascist racial and labor policies and were largely forgotten after the war. Ben-Ghiat restores them to Italian and international film history in this gripping account of empire, war, and the cinema of dictatorship.

Mediating Historical Responsibility brings together leading scholars and new voices in the interdisciplinary fields of memory studies, history, and cultural studies to explore the ways culture, and cultural representations, have been at the forefront of bringing the memory of past injustices to the attention of audiences for many years. Engaging with the darkest pages of twentieth-century European history, dealing with the legacy of colonialism, war crimes, genocides, dictatorships, and racism, the authors of this collection of critical essays address Europe’s ‘difficult pasts’ through the study of cultural products, examining historical narratives, literary texts, films, documentaries, theatre, poetry, graphic novels, visual artworks, material heritage, and the cultural and political reception of official government reports. Adopting an intermedial approach to the study of European history, the book probes the relationship between memory and responsibility, investigating what it means to take responsibility for the past and showing how cultural products are fundamentally entangled in this process.

The twentieth century saw a proliferation of media discourses on colonialism and, later, decolonisation. Newspapers, periodicals, films, radio and TV broadcasts contributed to the construction of the image of the African “Other” across the colonial world. In recent years, a growing body of literature has explored the role of these media in many colonial societies. As regards the Italian context, however, although several works have been published about the links between colonial culture and national identity, none have addressed the specific role of the media and their impact on collective memory (or lack thereof). This book fills that gap, providing a review of images and themes that have surfaced and resurfaced over time. The volume is divided into two sections, each organised around an underlying theme: while the first deals with visual memory and images from the cinema, radio, television and new media, the second addresses the role of the printed press, graphic novels and comics, photography and trading cards.

In The World Refugees Made, Pamela Ballinger explores Italy's remaking in light of the loss of a wide range of territorial possessions—colonies, protectorates, and provinces—in Africa and the Balkans, the repatriation of Italian nationals from those territories, and the integration of these "national refugees" into a country devastated by war and overwhelmed by foreign displaced persons from Eastern Europe. Post-World War II Italy served as an important laboratory, in which categories differentiating foreign refugees (who had crossed national boundaries) from national refugees (those who presumably did not) were debated, refined, and consolidated. Such distinctions resonated far beyond that particular historical moment, informing legal frameworks that remain in place today. Offering an alternative genealogy of the postwar international refugee regime, Ballinger focuses on the consequences of one of its key omissions: the ineligibility from international refugee status of those migrants who became classified as national refugees. The presence of displaced persons also posed the complex question of who belonged, culturally and legally, in an Italy that was territorially and politically reconfigured by decolonization. The process of demarcating types of refugees thus represented a critical moment for Italy, one that endorsed an ethnic conception of identity that citizenship laws made explicit. Such an understanding of identity remains salient, as Italians still invoke language and race as bases of belonging in the face of mass immigration and ongoing refugee emergencies. Ballinger's analysis of the postwar international refugee regime and Italian decolonization illuminates the study of human rights history, humanitarianism, postwar reconstruction, fascism and its aftermaths, and modern Italian history.

Decolonising Europe? Popular Responses to the End of Empire offers a new paradigm to understand decolonisation in Europe by showing how it was fundamentally a fluid process of fluxes and refluxes involving not only transfers of populations, ideas, and sociocultural practices across continents but also complex intra-European dynamics at a time of political convergence following the Treaty of Rome. Decolonisation was neither a process of sudden, rapid changes to European cultures nor one of cultural inertia, but a development marked by fluidity, movement, and dynamism. Rather than being a static process where Europe’s (former) metropoles and their peoples ‘at home’ reacted to the end of empire ‘out there’, decolonisation translated into new realities for Europe’s cultures, societies, and politics as flows, ebbs, fluxes, and cultural refluxes reshaped both former colonies and former metropoles. The volume’s contributors set out a carefully crafted panorama of decolonisation’s sequels in European popular culture by means of in-depth studies of specific cases and media, analysing the interwoven meaning, momentum, memory, material culture, and migration patterns of the end of empire across eight major European countries. The revised meaning of ‘decolonisation’ that emerges will challenge scholars in several fields, and the panorama of new research in the book charts paths for new investigations. The question mark in the title asks not only how European cultures experienced the ‘end of empire’ but also the extent to which this is still a work in progress.