意大利法西斯政府与西安事变

1936年12月12日的"西安事变"是历史学家公认的国共关系史上的重大事件.它结束了国共之间的内战,为两党第二次合作铺平了道路,意味着中国抗日战争的开始.有关西安事变的研究,一方面可加深对1930年代苏联对中国影响的理解,同时亦可深化人们对太平洋战争后中国共产党之所以在政治上获得成功的认知.①     

论法西斯意大利的外交选择

凡尔赛格局中,法西斯意大利既非“有”的国家,也非“无”的国家,而是介乎“有”与“无”之间的中间力量。意大利最后盟随德国,并不是一开始就有的既定方针,而是它在两次世界大战之间或主动、或被动的外交选择的结果。     

Fashion,the Politics of Style and National Identity in Pre–Fascist and Fascist Italy

The essay offers an analysis of fashion and its bearing on the construction of national identity and politics of style during fascism in Italy. No recent work on fascism has analysed the role of fashion in the complex and contradictory phases of the cultural politics of Mussolini’s regime. The essay aims to illustrate the two sides of fashion and their relevance to the period in question. It shows, on the one hand, how the regime used fashion to discipline the social body, especially women’s, and to create a national style recognisable as such; and, on the other, how fashion is also an individual act through which was expressed the creativity both of the people working in the fashion industry and of ordinary people who used fashion and style to demonstrate their non–conformity with the diktats of the regime. Pointing out that it was as a result of the debate on nationalism of the pre–fascist liberal period that premises for fascist policy were set, the essay argues that the history of fascist fashion policy is one of continuities rather than ruptures.     

Review Article: Fascist Italy at War

RENZO DE FELICE. Mussolini l'alleato: L'ltalia in guerra, 1940–1943: 1 : Dalla guerra ‘breve’ alla guerra lunga: II: Crisi e agonia del regime. Torino: Guilio Einaudi, 1990. Pp. xiv, 1,576. L. 150,000.     

Racisms compared: Fascist Italy and ultra-nationalist Japan

This article tries to compare the racisms of Fascist Italy and ultra-nationalist Japan as evidenced by foreign policy, attempting to categorize them into three dimensions: the inner logic of the nation state; the justification of expansionist foreign policies; and as an accelerator of cruelty in war. It also surveys Italo-Japanese relations by choosing some points of contact to scrutinize how different racisms reacted to each other.     

Italians at war: war and experience in Fascist Italy

This article examines Fascist violence in war from the perspective of the strategies employed by the Italian army. Focusing on the military’s use of violence from the re-conquest of Libya to the civil war in Italy, the article argues that Fascism systematically employed forms of violence that were both typical and original.     

Journeys to the other spaces of Fascist Italy

In the essay, 'Of Other Spaces', Michel Foucault contends that every society constructs sites which can be defined as effectively enacted utopias (heterotopias), sites where social policies are articulated and where ideals of social ordering are physically performed. The article examines how a number of places in Fascist Italy, which conformed entirely to the principles of the heterotopia that Foucault sets out, were perceived by a selection of prominent writers and journalists. It examines the recorded journeys to the cemeteries of the First World War, to various renovated prisons within Italy and finally to the new towns south of Rome. It explores the kind of mental and physical sensations which the different writers evoked as well as examining the ways in which their written accounts of their imaginative experiences interacted with the myths of identity and social control which were central to Fascist ideology.     

Geographical imaginations,public education and the everyday worlds of Fascist Italy

This article explores the phenomena of geographical imaginations and their seldom-noted promotion within various corners of Fascist Italy. Imagined geographies are socially constructed understandings of other places and regions and, as such, they are malleable, contingent, shifting and unquantifiable. Nevertheless, these imaginaries help us to navigate our imaginative worlds and our relative place in the material world. In 1930s Italy, various interest groups associated with the colonial and expansionist projects of Fascism promoted the development of wider geographical imaginaries among Italians. Academic geographers were often key figures in these initiatives: some prompted these projects, while others did so at the behest of the regime and its desire to expand Italians' coscienza geografica (the geographical imagination) to an ‘imperial level’. This article explores how academic geographers from Trieste sought to contribute to this project and to embed their geographical knowledge into the ordinary, everyday circuits of public life. The article therefore outlines the notion of the geographical imagination and demonstrates via case studies how Triestine geographers tried to nurture these phenomena. Finally, it suggests that, although elusive and amorphous, geographical imaginations were a feature of everyday life in some corners of Fascist Italy and, as such, they deserve academic attention.     

Actualism and the Fascist Historic Imaginary

This essay argues that, just like liberalism and communism, fascist ideology was based on a specific philosophy of history articulated by Giovanni Gentile in the aftermath of World War I. Gentile's actualist notion that history “belongs to the present” articulated an immanent vision of the relationship between historical agency, representation, and consciousness against all transcendental conceptions of history. I define this vision as historic (as opposed to “historical”) because it translated the popular notion of historic eventfulness into the idea of the reciprocal immanence of the historical and the historiographical act. I further show that the actualist philosophy of history was historically resonant with the Italian experience of the Great War and was culturally modernist. I insist, however, that the actualist catastrophe of the histori(ographi)cal act was also genealogically connected to the Latin‐Catholic rhetorical signification of “presence” that had sustained the development of Italian visual culture for centuries. Accordingly, I argue that the fascist translation of actualism into a historic imaginary was at the root of Italian fascism's appeal to both masses and intellectuals. Fascism presented itself as a historic agent that not only “made history,” but also made it present to mass consciousness. In fact, I conclude by suggesting that the fascist success in institutionalizing a proper mode of historic representation in the 1920s, and a full‐blown historic culture in the 1930s, may have also constituted a fundamental laboratory for the formation of posthistoric(al) imaginaries.     

British Women Folklorists in Post-Unification Italy: Rachel Busk and Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco

One indicator or precursor of the social emancipation of women in nineteenth-century Britain was the number of women who travelled in, and wrote about, continental Europe. Several such writers were involved with The Folklore Society, but this European and gendered contribution to the development of the discipline can be overlooked. This note considers the case of two such women, Rachel Busk and Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco, who, despite their opposing political commitments, made their home in Italy and wrote about that country’s folklore for a British audience.     

Ignazio Silone and the Fascist political police

Secondino Tranquilli (alias Ignazio Silone) was one of the founders of the Italian Communist Party (PCI) in January 1921. Esteemed by Moscow and the Comintern, Silone was given increasingly important functions in the clandestine PCI organization in the 1920s and was appointed to its Political Office. His political career, which ended with his expulsion from the party in summer 1931, was frequently recounted by Silone himself who, as a famous writer, felt obliged to come to terms with his political past. Recent studies by Mauro Canali and Dario Biocca of Silone's membership of the PCI have shown a rather different truth. The documents they have published show that ever since he was in the young socialist movement Silone was collaborating first with the Italian police and then with the Fascist police. Throughout, he was corresponding with a high-ranking official in the Italian police, Guido Bellone. Their relationship entered into a crisis that ended Silone's collaboration when in April 1928, following the explosion of a bomb in Milan that caused some twenty deaths, his brother Romolo Tranquilli was arrested and sentenced to twelve years' imprisonment. This clearly weighed on Silone's conscience and was probably the original cause of his eventual abondonment of politics and his own 'double' role, to become awriter instead. Thispainful journey involved frequent treatment in specialist clinics where Silone received intensive psychoanalytical treatment.