Part I. Constructions of Whiteness from Unification to Fascism. 1.1 Introduction

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1 Part I Constructions of Whiteness from Unification to Fascism 1.1 Introduction Part I of the book focuses on elements of continuity and discontinuity between the Liberal era and Fascism to reveal the intersectional articulation of Italianness as whiteness in a period marked by the nation-building process, colonial expansion, the ideological turn in the Codice unico per l impero and the proclamation of the empire (1936), as well as the subsequent Aryanist turn 1 set forth in the Manifesto of Racial Scientists (1938) when anti-semitism became a state doctrine. 2 In the first 70 years after Unification, discursive choices and symbolic articulations assigned a specific colour (from less white to black) to particular social groups or strata in several parts of the country, as well as to African populations under Italian rule. Blackness played a crucial role in the construction of Italians whiteness: anti-black stereotypes reflected a perceived need for emancipation from the widespread idea that Italians backward mores and political culture were the outcome of Alpine/ Latin/Roman interbreeding with black races. Anti-black stereotypes and the mystification of blackness as the negation of Italian whiteness, coupled with centuries-long anti-gypsyism, anti-judaism, and anti- Semitism, became the foundational elements of a racist popular culture that lasted far longer than colonial and fascist institutional racisms.

2 26 Constructions of Whiteness from Unification to Fascism My focus on ideas and representations of blackness owes to the role the opposition between blackness and whiteness played in linking the racialised construction of the nation-state with its imagined community, the Italian diaspora (emigrants from Italy were long considered black or mixed-race), the Italian colonial imaginary, and postcolonial selective memory. An intersectional approach exploring constructions of masculinity and femininity will reveal connections between processes of Othering in Italy and Overseas or between the internal abject and the monstrified colonial Other. To this extent, visual cultural products (from popular operas to photography to cinema), together with legal texts and scientific research, as well as works of art and literature, provide relevant insights to the definition of the hegemonic subject the one who has the right to look and the power to capture, produce, and reproduce Otherness through images in the expanded (colonial) space of the nation. Liberal and fascist discourses on the nation, and Mussolini s speeches in particular, were also crucial to the construction of the collective imaginary, weaving together shared beliefs that gradually came to comprise the image of the nation, albeit not without contradictions and divergences. This section focuses on the shift between the symbolic exclusion of (non-white) southern Italians from racialised representations of the Liberal national society (Chap. 2) and its symbolic inclusion by Fascism through the concept of stirpi italiche, the Italic kinships (Chap. 3). The interplay between constructions of the internal abject and constructions of the monstrified colonial Other was indeed crucial to a normative definition of gendered whiteness. By positioning blackness outside national borders, the notion of Italic kinship and its equivalence to race, civilisation, nation, and people managed to discursively establish the meaning of Italianness-as-Mediterraneanness and distinguish it from the racial identity of the colonised subjects (Mediterranean but African). References to its biological-historical-cultural Romanness served a whitening function. What the Liberal era and Fascism had in common was the process that produced those images of nation and race. The hetero-referential racialisation by contrast 3 that apparently prevailed in the Liberal era and early Fascism ( ) employed Otherness (be it internal, i.e., represented

3 Constructions of Whiteness from Unification to Fascism 27 by southern and rural populations, or colonial) to generate the symbolic context in which Italians were discursively identified as a race whites and more specifically as the Italian race or Italic race/kinship. Despite its marked prevalence, hetero-referential racialisation was never separate from self-referential racialisation; rather, they coexisted or even intersected. Alongside implied whiteness, a self-referential process evolved from discourses on race between the end of the nineteenth century and the 1920s 30s, claiming the existence of an Italic civilisation/race. At the same time, celebrations of racial mixing and the construction of Mediterraneanness as the counterpoint to Nordic Aryanism (supported by leading scientists and political figures, both in Italy and in northern Europe) theorised Italians racial identity as the result of a specifically Mediterranean and Roman melting pot. This construction was aimed at asserting both the superiority of Rome as an inclusive empire and the legacy of its colonial centrality within a nationalist revalorisation of the country s past culture and civilisation that would emphasise the potential of post-unification and fascist Italy. The self-referential reference to Rome made it possible, on the one hand, to discursively group all the so-called racial differences among Italians under a single national, racial identity. On the other hand, it allowed Italy s South to become more than a mere constitutive part of that assemblage: indeed, the cradle of the new model citizen. The new Italian rural, virile, anti-bourgeois, prolific, loyal to family, nation, Church, and Fascism, and part of those masses now reconciled with the nation [that] enter the State through the main gate, which the fascist revolution opened wide 4 could only be forged from its Mediterranean character. Conversely, rather than being a mere variant of the Caucasian or Indo- Atlantic race, Mediterraneanness became in its positive discursive form the epitome of fascist social engineering: (whitened) Mediterraneanness and the (modernised) traditional nature of southerners were claimed as the distinctive features of Italy s historical and cultural superiority over other European nations. Promoted as a core element and driving force of the fascist revival of Imperial Rome, it brought about a revolution through which a centuries-old civilisation would bridge the ancient and the modern world and perpetuate itself in the pursuit of power. 5

4 28 Constructions of Whiteness from Unification to Fascism Fascism s shifted and more inclusive colour lines will be explored (Chap. 3) through the re-signification of models of Italian masculinity and femininity the former as the virile and prolific standard of the Italic razza, both at home and in the colony, and the latter as the emblem of its purity and integrity, far removed from the femininity embodied by colonised women. This new meaning was generated by the opposition between the fascist model of femininity and the contested image of the Liberal-era middle-class woman (frigid and infertile, emancipated and decadent) or that of the colonised woman. Hypersexualised and regarded as a mere object of white men s colonial and sexual cannibalism, the latter was construed as an object of conquest, (sexual) desire and appropriation, and a means to the symbolic and physical reproduction of the coloniser s supremacy and whiteness. At the turn of the decade, the hetero-referential construction of Italians whiteness and its implied character ceased to prevail. A significant discursive shift marked the divide between early Fascism (which might be said to have ended with the Legge organica per l'impero and the condemnation of madamism between 1936 and 1937) and the following phase ( ). As recently argued, 6 the claim of Aryanness put forward at the end of the 1930s represented both a break with previous racial articulations and the main component of the fascist discourse on race. This phase was characterised by a shift towards decidedly self-referential forms of racial identification in Italian and fascist public discourse. New emphasis was placed not only on the unity and homogeneity of the Italian race ( Italians are Aryans, as was stated in the Manifesto) but also on its dissimilarity to inferior groups such as the Jews and those same kinships that until the first half of the 1930s the dominant doctrine had regarded as historically and biologically similar and related. The transition from the Mediterraneanist to the Aryanist phase entailed giving up former claims to superiority based on alleged proximity to the colonised populations, as well as any pretence of a civilising mission. 7 Instead, it discursively embraced the thesis that all Hamitic and Semitic peoples, be they Mediterranean or Italian Jews, were far removed from Italy s Aryans. Thus, what Fabrizio De Donno refers to as Roman universalism lost its centrality in the newly proclaimed fascist empire. What took its place was an exclusionary raciology, 8 which not only distinguished itself from the

5 Constructions of Whiteness from Unification to Fascism 29 traditional colonial racism and Catholic anti-judaism that had taken shape through the filter of social Darwinism but also, as argued by De Napoli, was no longer informed by Roman law. Notes 1. From this point on, the terms Mediterraneanist, Mediterraneanism, Aryanist, Aryanism, Europeism, and Europeists indicating schools of thought and their respective supporters will be used without quotation marks. 2. On this issue, see the works of Renzo de Felice, Michele Sarfatti, Simona Urso, and Giovanni Miccoli. In particular, De Felice, Giovanni Preziosi e le origini del Fascismo ( ), Rivista storica del socialismo 5, no. 17 (1962): ; De Felice, Storia degli ebrei italiani sotto il Fascismo (Torino: Einaudi, 1993); Giovanni Miccoli, Tra mito della Cristianità e secolarizzazione. Studi sul rapporto chiesa-società nell età contemporanea (Casale Monferrato: Marietti, 1985) and Miccoli, Antisemitismo e cattolicesimo (Brescia: Morcelliana, 2013); Simona Urso, Due modernità a confronto. Il modernismo cattolico e il rifiuto dell ebraismo riformato, in Burgio, Nel nome della razza, ; Michele Sarfatti, Gli ebrei nell Italia fascista. Vicende, identità, persecuzione (Torino: Einaudi, 2000); Sarfatti, La Shoah in Italia. La persecuzione degli ebrei sotto il fascismo (Torino: Einaudi, 2005). 3. The idea of a definition by contrast is borrowed from Michele Nani, Ai confini della nazione. Stampa e razzismo nell'italia di fine Ottocento (Roma: Carocci, 2006). 4. Dispatch, Mussolini, Fascism as The Creator of a Third Italian Civilization, 5. See Emilio Gentile, Il culto del littorio (Roma and Bari: Laterza, 1993), Renzo De Felice, The Jews in Fascist Italy (New York: Enigma, 2001), ; Barbara Sòrgoni, Racist Discourses and Practices in the Italian Empire under Fascism, in Sòrgoni, The Politics of Recognising Difference: Multiculturalism Italian Style (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), 41; Aaron Gillette, Racial Theories in Fascist Italy (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), ; Giulia Barrera, The Construction of Racial Hierarchies in Colonial Eritrea: The Liberal and Early Fascist Period , in

6 30 Constructions of Whiteness from Unification to Fascism A Place in the Sun. Africa in Italian Colonial Culture from Post-Unification to the Present, ed. Patrizia Palumbo (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2003), 81 3; Roberto Maiocchi, Scienza e Fascismo (Roma: Carocci, 2004), 140; and Olindo De Napoli, La prova della razza (Firenze: Le Monnier, 2009), On the alleged historical, cultural, religious, and racial ties between Italians on one hand, and Libyans, Eritreans, and Ethiopians on the other, as well as on the importance of the liberating function of Italian colonisers for imperial rhetoric, see Valeria Deplano, L Africa in casa. Propaganda e cultura coloniale nel Italia fascista (Firenze and Milano: Le Monnier/ Mondadori Education, 2015). 8. The terms raciology and racist logos were coined by Paul Gilroy in The Crisis of Race and Raciology, in Gilroy, Between Camps: Nations, Culture and the Allure of Race (London: Routledge, 2004),