Fascist Hybridities Representations of Racial Mixing and Diaspora Cultures under Mussolini

by Giuliani Caponetto, Rosetta

• ISBN13: 9781137481849
• ISBN10: 1137481846
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2015-04-09
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Summary

While less explicitly racist than its Germany Nazi counterpart, Italian Fascism attached considerable importance to racial purity. Fascist Hybridities examines how Italian literature and cinema of the 1930s are traversed by hybrid figures, and how these works ultimately reveal biracial offspring and Levantines as interchangeable characters who, in the historical scenario under which Mussolini’s Fascist regime operated, present unique and specific threats to notions of Italian racial and cultural purity. As Rosetta Giuliani-Caponetto shows, that more often than not, the visual and textual presence of mulatto and Levantine characters stoked deep racial and cultural anxieties, forcing their audiences to uncomfortably examine, rather than confirm, their own collective identity.

Author Biography

Rosetta Giuliani Caponetto is Assistant Professor of Italian at Auburn University, USA. Her work appears in Border-Crossings: Narrative and Demarcation in Postcolonial Literatures and Media; Postcolonial Italy: Challenging National Homogeneity; and Studi postcoloniali di cinema e media.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Meticci and Levantines in Literary and Cinematic Representations of Colonial Experience in Africa

1. Art of Darkness: The Aestheticization of Black People in Fascist Colonial Novels

2. The Dissident Literature of Enrico Pea and Fausta Cialente

3. Fade to White: Cinematic Representations of Italian Whiteness

4. Levantines and Biracial Offspring in Postwar Italy

Conclusion