Exploitation,fascist violence and social cleansing: a study of Franco's concentration camps from a comparative perspective

One of the most noticeable topics within recent Spanish historiography is the analysis of processes of mass violence. Salient among these were the Franco concentration camps, a violent re-educational system made up of more than 180 camps, 104 of which were permanent. The camps operated from 1936 until 1947, under the control of Franco's army, with its corresponding regime of forced labour and exploitation of prisoners of war. Half a million Spaniards and Europeans experienced first hand the Spanish version of the fascist concentration-camp system. This article offers an analysis of the inside history of Franco's concentration camps and then locates them comparatively within a theoretical and empirical Fascist model of internment, exploitation and violence.     

Violence and the politics of prestige: the fascist turn in colonial Libya

In 1922–1923, Fascist Party leaders hoped to define a sharp break from previous approaches to colonial rule and imperial expansion in Italy's Libyan territories. Mussolini's nomination of Luigi Federzoni, a leading figure of the Italian Nationalist Association, as the Minister of Colonies at the end of 1922 signalled a new era in Italian colonial administration focused on aggressive expansion and the institution of what was known as a ‘politics of prestige’. This definition of a fascist style of colonial rule appealed to the enthusiasm for violence among blackshirt militias and early fascist supporters in the Libyan territories. This definition of a fascist style of colonial rule, however, inspired immediate reaction from both colonial officials, with stakes in maintaining a measure of continuity and stability, and from those within the nascent Fascist Party who wanted to promote an alternative model of fascism in the colonies. This article examines contests to define fascism and fascist colonial rule in the Libyan territories through the employment of voluntary militias, the competing voices of Fascist Party outposts, and various programmes for the development of a colonial culture.     

Performing the Lodge: Masonry, masculinity, and nineteenth-century North American moral geography

Geographies reinforce gender and facilitate gender performativity. In this study of nineteenth-century Masonry, we demonstrate the influence of Masonic Temples in the promotion and performance of ‘Masonic masculinity.’ Masonry, through its design and construction of interior space, its embedded material symbolism and especially the geography of Masonic ritual itself, inculcated morality in prospective and raised Master Masons. Masonic Temple architecture and décor typify Victorian moral environmentalism vis-à-vis the parlor, the Masonic Lodge a domesticated male space where significant numbers of bourgeois men (and women) acted out a particular and peculiar masculine moral geography.     

Italian neopatriotism: Debating national identity in the 1990s

This article discusses some of the distinguishing features of the debate over national identity that took place in Italy in the 1990s. Reacting against the threats of the Lega Nord and in response to the new ideological and political landscape of the post-Cold War order, a number of Italian intellectuals rediscovered the value of patriotism. Searching for the origins of the Italians' allegedly weak sense of national identity, some questioned the Resistance and the party system that originated from it. While this historical revisionism has been the object of well-deserved criticism, there is another type of thematization of identity which has received less attention: it deploys the old notion of an 'Italian character', which appears frequently in the press and the media. The article shows that this discourse, too, is a way of articulating patriotism, and then reflects on the meaning that this reconfiguration of ideologies and identities acquires in the new context, both domestic and international.     

Party system change and electoral platforms: A study of the 1996 Italian election

Comparative research suggests that parties regularly campaign by emphasizing issues on which they are advantaged and by ignoring topics that are traditionally associated with other parties. Focusing on the 1996 Italian elections, this article discusses whether such a generalization holds when the party system is affected by radical changes such as those that occurred in Italy in the mid-1990s. Moreover, the analysis of the party electoral platforms highlights some basic features of the new parties, and identifies either innovations or continuities with the past. I present evidence that in 1996 the Italian parties mostly competed on a similar range of issues. Especially regarding economic policy, there was not a polarized ideological debate: also the centre-left parties converged on a moderate position by playing down typical socialist themes such as state intervention and the expansion of social services. I also analyse the degree of internal programmatic cohesion of the two main coalitions, the Ulivo (Olive Tree) and the Polo delle Libertà (Freedom Pole) and relate it to the stability of the Italian political system.     

Maciste goes to war: Maciste alpino (1916)

During the war years, both fiction and non-fiction films relating to the war populated Italian screens. This article examines Maciste alpino (1916), one of the best known and best received of the popular Maciste series of Italian silent cinema, in light of several factors: the growing nationalist movement that saw intervention in World War I as the means of creating political consensus; the sophistication and development of narrative, character, and attractions in the Maciste series; and its relation to popular film genres such as comic serials and the emerging strongman genre. Maciste functioned as a modern weapon par excellence, a Futurist mechanized man whose muscled body constituted its own fighting machine. At the same time, through his humor, goodwill, and muscled physique he became a national symbol of Italian wartime might.     

Cultural globalization and the dominance of the American film industry: cultural policies,national film industries,and transnational film

The global film market is a strategic site for examining the global influence of American media culture. Using a database compiled by the European Audiovisual Observatory, I show that the global film market consists of 34 countries that produce over 25 films per year. Thirty-two countries produce less than 26 films. The countries that produce over 25 films per year were categorized as Super Producers (four countries), Major Producers (seven countries), Medium Producers (11 countries), and Minor Producers (12 countries). Lists of top 10 films in these countries show that US films dominate, followed by local films. A discussion of national cultural policies shows that film policy contributes to the success of national film industries but does not enable them to challenge US dominance. Hollywood’s need for global box office receipts has led to changes in the content of Hollywood film toward deculturized, transnational films, a trend that is also evident in other countries.     

Gendering pastoral power: masculinity,affective labour and competitive bonds of solidarity among Filipino migrant men in Saudi Arabia

This article draws on Foucault’s concept of pastoral power to understand Filipino men’s care work and the making of migrant masculinities in Saudi Arabia. Feminist scholars have indicated the gendered nature of pastoral power and emphasized what Young refers to as the ‘logic of masculinist protection’ that characterizes the contemporary security state. However, the notion of pastoral power invites further consideration of the taken for granted cultural assumptions about the way that hegemonic masculinity and forms of homosociality are characterized mainly by aggression, competition and dominance. Men’s talk about and practical involvement in assisting fellow migrants in diasporic settings foregrounds the way that an ethics of care runs up against and is entangled with the competitive bonds of masculine solidarities. While markers of material success are privileged in measuring migrant men’s accomplishments in country of origin, practices of care become central to men’s achievement of symbolic power and social legitimacy especially among their peers in the diaspora. That spatialization is also linked to temporally shifting models of masculinity and normative expectations about men over the life course.     

Angels,Illusions, Hydras,and Chimeras: Violence and Humanity

Gibson, Kathleen R. and Tim Ingold, eds. Tools, Language and Cognition in Human Evolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. xii + 483 pp. including index. $69.95 cloth.

Wallman, Joel. Aping Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. xii + 191 pp. including notes, references, and indices. $44.95 cloth, $14.95 paper.     

The global,the ethnic and the gendered war: women and rape in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo

The purpose of this study was to illuminate the perspectives of women who experienced sexual violence perpetrated in the warscapes of eastern Democratic Republic of Congo. Civilians are targeted for rape, loot and pillage yielding deleterious effects on the social fabric and the sustenance the community provides. The article is based on 11 qualitative semistructured interviews and 4 written narratives from women of reproductive age, recruited from organizations providing support post-sexual violation. The study departs from a larger ethnographic project investigating the phenomenon of war-rape. Thematic analysis guided the analysis through the theoretical lenses of structural violence and intersectionality. The women expressed total insecurity and a multitude of losses from bodily integrity, health, loss of family, life course possibilities, livelihoods and a sense of place; a profound dispossession of identity and marginalization. Pregnancies resulting from rape reinforced stigma and burdened the survivor with raising a stigmatized child on the margins of society. Perpetrators of rape were mostly identified as Interhamwe (Rwandan Hutus rebels) who entered Congo after the Rwandan genocide in 1994. Their goal, according to the women, was to spread HIV and impregnate Congolese women, thereby destroying families, communities and society. The women survivors of war-rape described experiences of profound loss in this conflict which has global, ethnic and gendered dimensions. Congo's conflict thus requires critical reflection on how local wars and subsequent human suffering are situated in a matrix of globalization processes, enabled by transnational actors and embedded in structural violence.     

Ordinary Emergency: Drones,Police, and Geographies of Legal Terror

This paper brings into conversation two ostensibly disparate geographies of state violence: the routine police surveillance and killing of members of the “dangerous classes” in the United States, an issue that is in no way new but nevertheless has gained increased attention over the last year with the Black Lives Matter movement; and the targeted drone strikes against “terrorist suspects” in the “war on terror”. By laying side by side the “war drone” and domestic police power, it becomes readily apparent that despite ostensible differences—foreign vs. domestic, war vs. peace, exceptional vs. normal, military vs. police, legal vs. extralegal—the unmanning of state violence gains much of its political and legal force from the language and categories that have long animated the routine policing of domestic territory. The paper calls for taking the violence of police power more seriously than many drone commentators have.     

Sins of memory: reflections on the lack of an Italian Nuremberg and the administration of international justice after 1945

This article reconstructs the history of the major trial that the Allies planned to institute against the entire military command of the Nazi armies operating in Italy from 1943 to 1945. The trial was prepared on the same juridical and technical bases as the Nuremberg Tribunal, but it never took place. The reason was that it would have jeopardized the re-integration of the Federal Republic in the European community, and would also have risked placing the Italian government in the embarrassing position of having the Italian army prosecuted for crimes committed in the countries occupied by the Rome?–?Berlin axis. For those reasons, the trial was abandoned and instead only legal proceedings were taken only for some marginal cases, creating the impression that these were simply isolated cases of individual responsibility. The enigma of this missing trial and an explanation of the limits of international justice can only be understood in terms of the political situation in post-war Europe, the relations between Italy and the Allies and the double game played by the Italian government. These events served, however, to give rise to highly selective memories of totalitarianism and the war.     

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.     

Professionalising the British film industry: the UK Film Council and public support for film production

This article examines the UK Film Council’s objective to reorganise and reallocate public funding for film from 2000 onwards. I argue that the model adopted by the UKFC was innovative on two levels. First, it separated public funds available for film production into three separate streams and then hired industry professionals to head each individual fund. I also examine how the funds developed over the lifetime of the organisation, with each appointed head shaping the principles of their respective funds in accordance with the wider objectives of the UKFC. Drawing on strategy documents, internal papers and interviews with key personnel, I argue that the UKFC worked to position itself as a ‘vanguard organisation’ seeking to shake up an independent sector seemingly reliant on state handouts and introduce a commercial perspective to the industry. This mission met an abrupt end, however, when the incoming Coalition government closed down the organisation in 2010.     

Byron to D'Annunzio: from liberalism to fascism in national poetry, 1815–1920

ABSTRACT. From Byron's death at Missolonghi in 1824 to D'Annunzio's capture of Fiume for Italy in 1919, the nationalism of universal liberalism and independence struggles changed, in literature as in politics, to cruel dictatorial fascism. Byron was followed by a series of idealistic fighter‐poets and poet‐martyrs for national freedom, but international tensions culminating in World War I exposed fully the intolerant, brutal side of nationalism. D'Annunzio, like Byron, both a major poet and charismatic war leader, was a key figure in transforming nineteenth‐century democratic nationalism into twentieth‐century dictatorial fascism. The poet's ‘lyrical dictatorship’ at Fiume (1919–20) inspired Mussolini's seizure of power in 1922, with far‐reaching political consequences. The poet became the dangerous example of a Nietzschean Übermensch, above common morality, predatory and morally irresponsible. This article shows how the meaning of nationalism was partly determined and transformed by poets, illustrating their role as ‘unacknowledged legislators of the world’.     

Deconstructing identities on the scaffold: the execution of Hugh Despenser the Younger, 1326

In this article, I will argue that the public execution of aristocratic traitors should be read in a wider socio-cultural context in conjunction with the more common interpretation of treason executions as state-controlled legalised violence. The latter approach tends to obscure the issues of honour and status which define identities created in a decidedly public sphere. This is in particular relevant for the limited number of elaborate executions of male aristocratic traitors in late thirteenth- and early fourteenth-century England. Concerning only a handful of men, these executions stand out in their emphasis on public humiliation and degradation, as well as in their insistence on destroying the integrity of the traitor's body. This implies a shared cultural understanding of aristocratic masculinities, founded in notions of nobility of lineage, loyalty, military prowess and physical health. Treason, as breach of loyalty, undermined this image of nobility, and indeed created a contradiction in terms: conceptually, corrupted nobility could not exist. By examining these executions in the light of aristocratic masculine self-representations, it becomes clear that these events are as much about punishing crimes and the breach of loyalty as about re-aligning cultural notions of nobility and ignobility by means of the traitor's body.     

Italian Jews from Emancipation to the Racial Laws,by Cristina M. Bettin

The recent argument that the notion of ‘transition’ should be set aside in attempting to explain the trajectory of Italian politics in the past two decades is to be welcomed, but does not go far enough in explaining why we, as Italianists, got our case wrong and how exactly we might get our case right today. The transitional ‘myth’ was born and maintained despite growing evidence of its inherently problematic nature, in both conceptual and empirical terms. The concept of ‘transition’ needs more serious conceptual treatment and empirical application, but even with this work it is unlikely to be concluded that Italy is in transition. Freeing Italy and Italianists from this conventional wisdom, while, at the same time, not abandoning the idea that something exceptional happened to Italian politics in the early 1990s will help enrich the debate on the nature of the political change that Italy has experienced in the past 17 years.