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In the dystopian 1935 novel It Can’t Happen Here, Sinclair Lewis imagines what it would look like if fascism came to the United States. It Can’t Happen Here is a richly productive text for anybody interested in teaching fascism, but the work requires pedagogical caution, as students tend to find it overwhelming, especially in the post-2016-election era. In this short essay, I consider how best to teach students to read a novel that, though originally intended as a satirical take on the political situation of the United States and the world in the interwar period, has now become unnervingly relevant and prescient.

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In this essay I argue that Francesco Guccini and Loriano Macchiavelli’s Tango e gli altri. Romanzo di una raffica anzi tre (2008) calls into question a popular narrative that converts the Resistenza, a heterogeneous revolutionary and anti-fascist movement, into a symbol of nationalist propaganda. Because he is at once a carabiniere, a partigiano, and a meridionale, the novel’s hero, Santovito, who is charged with reopening a case adjudicated by a partisan tribunal, poses an ontological challenge to the mythology of the Resistance. Nevertheless, it is precisely this hybridity that enables Santovito to understand that confronting the tarnished legacy of the Resistance preserves the integrity of the movement by restoring to collective memory the tangle of personal conflicts and interests that intersected with Italy’s unprecedented civil strife.