Fascist Hybridities: Representations of Racial Mixing and Diaspora Cultures under Mussolini

Under Italian Fascism, African-Italian mulattoes and white Italians living in Egypt posed a particular threat to the pursuit of a homogenous national identity. This book examines novels and films of the period, showing that their attempts at stigmatization were self-undermining, forcing audiences to reassess their collective identity. 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: Rosetta Giuliani Caponetto
• | Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• | Publication Date: Apr 09, 2015
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• | Binding: Hardback
• | ISBN-13: 9781137481849
• | ISBN-10: 1137481846