Race, Nation and Gender in Modern Italy

Abstract

There is no systematic coverage of the racialisation of the planet. This series is the first attempt to present a comprehensive mapping of global racisms, providing a way in which to understand global racialisation and acknowledge the multiple generations of different racial logics across regimes and regions. Unique in its intellectual agenda and innovative in producing a new empirically-based theoretical framework for understanding this glocalised phenomenon, Mapping Global Racisms considers racism in many underexplored regions such as Russia, Arab racisms in North African and Middle Eastern contexts, and racism in Pacific contries such as Japan, Hawaii, Fiji and Samoa.More information about this series at

Fascist Samurais: the Japanese race in the Italian imaginary during the Second World War and beyond

“…The surprising longevity of these ideas after the end of Fascism finds its raison d’être in the historical context of the postwar years of reconstruction. The fact is that when the Italian constitution came into force in 1948, the formal decision to outlaw Fascist racism from the Italian legislation was a symbolic gesture of rupture with the past, rather than an opportunity to reflect on the racial imaginary that underpinned the drafting of Fascist racist laws (Giuliani, 2019, 86). This lack of public debate in the aftermath of the Second World War allowed racist ideas (like the one posing the existence of a set of superior Aryan-Japanese virtues) to survive the end of Fascism and then circulate, undeterred, in the political underbelly of Italian society 14…”

Purezza e meticciato: the Italian colonial novel and the (re)production of Italian whiteness

“…Locating this standpoint in the historical context means to recognise the contradictory nature of Fascist racism, a point of view widely shared among scholars (e.g. Cassata 2011; De Donno 2006; Giuliani 2019). The originality of my contribution in respect to the secondary literature lies in the access points from which I approach this problem.…”

“…First and foremost, the narrative structures of these stories provide clues to the stereotypes with which the image of the colonial Other was built. Along with movies, short stories, comic strips, poster designs and so forth, colonial novels are an incredibly fertile archive of stereotypes of colonial women (Faloppa 2013; Giuliani 2019; Pinkus 1995). Secondly, the ways in which native women are represented provides the negative of the positive strategies used to build the identity of white men.…”

“…19.The trope of the ‘imagined community of the nation’ can be retrieved in Giuliani's reappraisal of Benedict Anderson's theorisation (Giuliani 2019). …”

“…In a recent article Benedetta Zocchi pinpoints the difference between liberal and imperial racism as the shift of interest ‘from the destiny of the Africans to the destiny of Italians’ (Zocchi 2019, 21). Basically, the discontinuity between these two forms of racism, considered as fundamentally incompatible, is to be found in the distinction between hetero-referential and self-referential determinations of racial difference (Guillaumin 1992; Giuliani 2019). 1 Zocchi stresses the importance of the 1936 imperial turning point in moulding Italian racist discourse.…”