La decolonizzazione del Mediterraneo: una chiave per capire il presente

Labanca, Nicola

doi:10.12977/nov69

Cited by 3 publications

(6 citation statements)

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“…These images convey a narrative according to which the Italian troops fighting in Ethiopia were in very good moral and material conditions – a narrative which has been proved to be false by historiography: while analyzing the outtakes of the Fox Movietone films about the Italian invasion of Ethiopia, Robert Herzstein maintains that ‘outtakes of the Italian armed forces on the eve of the Fascist aggression against Ethiopia in 1935 portray a military that lacked discipline’ (Herzstein , 1988: 316). This insubordination was often due to the overall precarious conditions of Italians in the frontline (Del Boca, 1979: 397; Labanca, 2005). For instance, soldiers were hungry since the military command did not provide enough food, thus they hunted local animals contravening the military rules.…”

Section: Beyond the Frame: The Genealogy Of A Productmentioning

confidence: 99%

Remediating family memories of Italian colonialism: Beyond the Frame as process and product

Brioni

Mancosu

2023

Forum Italicum: A Journal of Italian Studies

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The article analyzes Beyond the Frame ( Oltre i bordi, 2023), a film based on Simone Brioni's fortuitous discovery of a family archive: a box of photographs taken in Italian East Africa in the 1930s by a distant relative. Beyond the Frame discusses colonial photography and visuality, as well as the material legacies of that past, challenging the gaze through which they framed the subjective and collective idea of Africa in Italian society. The article is divided into two parts, each of which discusses colonial photography and how Beyond the Frame observes, interprets, and reflects on how the legacy of colonialism shapes our present. In the first part, Brioni traces the process that led to the construction of a narrative that interweaves personal reflections and collective history. In the second part, Gianmarco Mancosu draws upon Ann Laura Stoler's work to discuss how the colonial archive and the remains of empire fashion our present, with a particular emphasis on photography and on colonial traces in the Italian cityscape. The article shows how the film works with as well as against the archive: how it enacts a process of resignification, thus modifying the original meaning of colonial pictures.

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Section: Beyond the Frame: The Genealogy Of A Productmentioning

confidence: 99%

Remediating family memories of Italian colonialism: Beyond the Frame as process and product

Brioni

Mancosu

2023

Forum Italicum: A Journal of Italian Studies

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“…Following the principles laid out by visionary theorists of air warfare – like the Italian Giulio Douhet in The Command of the Air – this colonial conflict materialised European prophecies on future aero-chemical warfare through the first systematic use of ‘large scale aerial bombings with aggressive chemicals’ (Rochat, 2007 [1996]: 72–73). Although the use of gas was never fully confirmed by the Italian regime, and was instead removed from both veterans’ and citizens’ collective memory and kept secret for decades (Belladonna, 2015; Del Boca, 2007 [1996]: 147–177; Labanca, 2005: 381; Rochat, 2007 [1996]: 99–101), its effects uniquely shook European and international public opinion (Sbacchi, 1997: 73). While gas had already been limitedly employed on colonial battlefields after World War I by French and Spanish forces in Morocco, Japanese forces in China, and the Italian aviation in Libya (Del Boca, 2007 [1996]: 148; Pedriali, 2007 [1996]: 133; Sbacchi, 1997: 73; Smith, 2017: 20), the sheer destruction disseminated on Ethiopian territory earned this conflict the eloquent albeit perhaps inaccurate title of ‘first modern war of extermination on colonial territory’ (Xylander cited in Del Boca, 2010: 150).…”

Section: Theorising War Forgetting Airmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…At the heart of this project was a radical transformation of Italians into Fascist ‘New Men’, a symbol of white modernity forged through war (Belladonna, 2015: 262). While it is unclear whether Italian soldiers in the Abyssinian War shared an explicit definition of this New Man (Labanca, 2005: 247), it was an almost dogmatic truth that this transformation would come through the air.…”

Section: Enveloping the Atmospheric Soldier: Aerial War And Imperial ...mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Importantly, such convictions animated these authors’ political and belligerent ethos. In particular, Marinetti took active part in Italy’s imperial project, participating in the Libyan War (1911) – where he joyfully admired Italian aviators’ heroic deeds (Wohl, 1994: 140–141) – and enthusiastically volunteered for the Abyssinian War at the age of 60 (Labanca, 2005: 164). Writing during his time in Ethiopia, Marinetti summarises the role of such a uniquely modern colonial war (Labanca, 2005: 164) – dominated by aviation – in re-making Italians as individuals and as a Fascist people:This African war is [.…”

Section: Enveloping the Atmospheric Soldier: Aerial War And Imperial ...mentioning

confidence: 99%

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Breathless war: martial bodies, aerial experiences and the atmospheres of empire

Brandimarte

2023

European Journal of International Relations

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Following a widespread fascination with drones, the materiality of aerial warfare – its bodies, embodied experiences, technologies – has received increasing attention in International Relations (IR) scholarship. This article pushes for a deeper, political theorisation of air in the study of war in its material and embodied dimensions through a critical reading of the Abyssinian War (1935–1936) – a central yet largely neglected conflict in the colonial history of world politics. Exploring the joint deployment of aeroplanes and mustard gas in Ethiopia via a mosaic of sources – literature, strategic thought, cartoons and memoirs – I argue that aerial relations expose the production of a racialised global order underpinned by more-than-human war experiences. Bringing together geographer Derek McCormack’s concept of ‘envelopment’ and Black Studies scholar Christina Sharpe’s idea of ‘the weather’, I show how Italy’s imperial desires – and their international perceptions – cannot be theorised in separation from aerial experiences that are conceived as excessive of human bodies, sensing and imagination. This analysis thus makes two central contributions to the critical study of war in IR. First, an aerial reading of the Abyssinian War highlights the political importance of war experience beyond the human. Second, it challenges studies of drone warfare that reduce discussions of air to either the strategic, technical and ontological plane or to the intimate, embodied and phenomenological one. Instead, the more-than-human aerial experiences of the Abyssinian War call for a theorisation of air as both material and affective, technical and embodied, and grand strategic and intimate.

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“…Other key contributions on the military campaigns are Del Boca (1980) and Longo (2005). See Labanca (2015) for a more recent critical overview of the conflict and bibliographical apparatus.…”

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confidence: 99%

The two voices of the first Italian Canadian poet: Liborio Lattoni, fascist racial propaganda, and the legacy of Giacomo Leopardi

Brera

2023

Forum Italicum: A Journal of Italian Studies

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Liborio Lattoni (1874–1958) settled in Montreal in 1908 and soon became a champion of Italian patriotic propaganda, both during the Great War and until 1940, when he and his son Mario were interned for being followers of Mussolini's regime. This pioneer of Italian Canadian literature, recreated, through the columns of a fascist periodical and a relentless poetic production spanning from the Thirties to the end of the Fifties, a transnational cultural identity which mixed contemporary politics, racial prejudice, and linguistic testimonies of ethnic belonging through the absorption of both elements of fascist propaganda and the linguistic and stylistic emulation of the fellow marchigiano poet Giacomo Leopardi. This study of Lattoni's poems published in the Italian Canadian ethnic press between the two wars highlights the ambiguous relationship between nationalist and transnational cultural practices and expands the understanding of the uses of literature in fascist propaganda, especially as a counterpoint of key historical events such as the military invasion of Ethiopia.

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La decolonizzazione del Mediterraneo: una chiave per capire il presente

Cited by 3 publications

References 0 publications

Remediating family memories of Italian colonialism: Beyond the Frame as process and product

Remediating family memories of Italian colonialism: Beyond the Frame as process and product

Breathless war: martial bodies, aerial experiences and the atmospheres of empire

The two voices of the first Italian Canadian poet: Liborio Lattoni, fascist racial propaganda, and the legacy of Giacomo Leopardi

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