The Monument to Victory in Bolzano: desacralisation of a fascist relic

The Monument to Victory in Bolzano, raised to remember Italian soldiers who fell in the First World War and to celebrate the victory over the Austro-Hungarian army, was contested from the moment of its installation in 1928. The German-speaking inhabitants of Bolzano were offended by its expression of Italian patriotism and the monument continued to symbolise the antagonism between the Italian- and the German-speaking population in the period following the end of Second World War. The monument’s explicit fascist propaganda attracted strong polemical reactions and some political groups even asked for it to be demolished. A recently-opened permanent exhibition in the crypt of the monument explores the twentieth-century dictatorships of Italy and their impact on Bolzano. Its historicisation offers a new interpretation of the monument – not one based on a schism between the populations of Bolzano, but rather one proposing reconciliation. This historicisation happens through the contextualisation of the monument, an efficient tool for the ‘desacrilisation’ of politically charged buildings; by exposing the detested ideology that they represent, they are stripped of their original ‘sacred’ character. This process also shows that it is possible for controversial, politically significant structures to become legitimate parts of a country’s modern heritage.     

Between metapolitics and apoliteia : The Nouvelle Droite's strategy for conserving the fascist vision in the 'interregnum'

The French Nouvelle Droite (ND) represents something of an enigma for students of the far Right as its political allegiances and tactics seem to yield no clear view of its ideological positioning. Here it is argued that one strand of the contemporary ND draws on elements both of Armin Mohler's Conservative Revolution and of the thought of the Italian writer Julius Evola. The fusion allows ND scholars such as Alain de Benoist to develop a stance on the modern world which, for all its claims to be 'metapolitical', still contains a residue of fascist ideology in its call for cultural regeneration.     

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.     

The impeachment was a fascist and conservative turn against culture

In this talk, Brazilian media theorist Ivana Bentes (who was briefly Secretary of Citizens’ Rights and Cultural Diversity in Dilma Rousseff’s second government) revisits the protests of 2013, driven by progressive and emancipatory agendas but subsequently hijacked by a media-induced anti-corruption discourse that led to the parliamentary impeachment of the elected head of state and the installation of vice-president Michel Temer at the helm of a right-wing coalition. Why, Bentes asks, has the Left not been able to capitalize on this crisis of representation and what can cultural and media activisms do to rebuild the coalition that took to the streets five years ago against the World Cup and Olympic spending spree and in favour of land rights and the right to the city?     

Unmaking the fascist man: masculinity,film and the transition from dictatorship

This essay examines the recasting and renegotiation of Italian masculinity during the war and during the transition from dictatorship to democracy. Film is my privileged source for understanding the complexities of male experience during this period of dramatic change, but I also rely on war crimes charges, diaries and memoirs. While not explicitly comparative in nature, the essay considers whether we can speak of a ‘crisis of masculinity’ in postwar Italy akin to that diagnosed by historians of postwar Germany and France. Within this broad frame, the essay focuses the experiences and representations of one category of men who evoked particular anxieties about the legacies of defeat and the redemption of Italian men for democratic models of fatherhood and citizenship: veterans, in particular returned prisoners of war. The 1946 film Il bandito (The Bandit, Alberto Lattuada), which I analyze in the last section of the essay, dramatizes the situation of these returned prisoners and the problem of a generation of men raised according to fascist norms that linked masculinity to the performance of aggressive acts.     

The impossible capital: Monumental Rome under liberal and fascist regimes, 1870-1943

Every nation-state has a capital city from where the central government's institutions operate and where the past of the nation is remembered monumentally. Following unification in 1870 Rome became the capital of the new Italy. Turning it into a singular site to represent the aspirations of the regimes that came to power, however, proved an impossible task. Not only did the Liberal and Fascist regimes of the period 1870-1943 have contradictory intentions and goals, they also ran up against the complexities of Rome's own history in trying to establish their own. This paper contends that there are important similarities between the two regimes in their approaches to making Rome a capital for the new state and that contemporary cultural analysis of the Fascist regime misses this continuity when it takes the regime's claims to aesthetic novelty and architectural innovation at face value. In the end, Rome resisted attempts at using its monumental space to symbolically unify a country that remained materially and culturally divided.     

The 2010 independence jubilees: the politics and aesthetics of national commemoration in Africa

In 2010, as many as seventeen African states celebrated their independence jubilees. The debates surrounding the organisation of these celebrations, and the imagery and performances they employed, reflect the fault lines with which African nation‐building has to contend, such as competing political orientations as well as religious, regional and ethnic diversity. The celebrations represented constitutive and cathartic moments of nation‐building, aiming to enhance citizens' emotional attachments to the country and inviting to remember, re‐enact and re‐redefine national history. They became a forum of debate about what should constitute the norms and values that make‐up national identity and, in the interstices of official ceremonies, provided space for the articulation of new demands for public recognition. A study of the independence celebrations thus allows us to explore contested processes of nation‐building and images of nationhood and to study the role of ritual and performance in the (re)production of nations.     

Introduction: gendered mobilities and transnational identities

In this short introduction to a themed section on gendered mobilities and transnational identities the articles are introduced and the three key conceptual themes which emerge from the collection are discussed. It is argued first, that gendered migration patterns reconfigure all the social relations within transnational family formations. Second, that chains of care need to be conceptualised in more complex ways recognising multiple forms and circulations of care. Finally, it is suggested that attention needs to be paid to the ways in which institutions intersect with migration and transnational family formations.     

Destructive creation: fascist urban planning,architecture and New Towns in the Pontine Marshes

This paper examines the construction, architecture, planning and design of New Towns in the Pontine Marshes, south of Rome, in the 1930s, analysing the discourses which contributed to their shaping and settlement. It focuses specifically on the plans and architectural characteristics of the city of Sabaudia as the best example of fascist urban utopias in the area. The paper also moves beyond an analysis of architecture and planning to consider the human beings who were slated for occupying what were viewed as ideal, utopian fascist spaces. This is done through an investigation of Italy's ruralization and internal colonization policies, which aimed to tackle a ‘demographic problem’ defined through recourse to statistics and sociological analysis. These policies were animated by colonists, and their families, chosen by the regime's institutions to take part in the Pontine Marshes project. Italian fascism's structuring of a new urban environment, which stretched from grand systemic designs to the measurement of mosquito net dimensions in colonial houses' bedrooms, justified the attempted social and political control of fascism's experimental urban subjects.     

Climbing heritage: The lines and aesthetics of rock climbing

Climbing is an experience born of the interplay of aesthetics and heritage. Nowadays, climbing attracts people in droves, all eager to join the contest between body and rock. In this article, the author addresses the refined social background of climbing. He asks how the intangible heritage left behind in rocks by generations of climbers manifests itself in the aesthetics of movement and the experiences embedded in the lines that form the climbing routes. How might anthropologists study the mind-body experiences and traces left by generations of rock users? How are we to understand the multisensory craft of climbing?     

Pinochet: The Politics

Against the background of the Pinochet affair, the author considers that a new era of international politics is in the process of being created. The House of Lords' ruling which has allowed extradition procedures against the former Chilean dictator, is understood as a formidable and groundbreaking decision in international law based on the defence of human rights against crimes committed by authoritarian and unlawful rulers. The decision taken under the European Convention on extradition and the setting up of a Permanent International Criminal Court in the summer of 1998 are, according to the author, signs that international law and international politics are moving in the direction of a universal acceptance that violators of human rights must bepunished.
However, the author is also cautious about the tension between the new path opened to international politics and the old power politics based on the absolute and indivisible sovereignty of the state. Double standards will certainly prevail and powerful states, in particular the United States, are reluctant to accept that international law and international politics are in the process of change.     

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.