Abstract
“I speak well of Mussolini not out of nostalgia, but because at the time we were enthusiastic about him” one of my interviewees assured me.2 “There was no reason to complain,” explained another, while describing what life was like for Italians in the colony of Libya in the 1930s.3 Referring to his compatriots who arrived in Libya thanks to an extensive state settlement program, a longtime Italian resident in Tripoli said, “Those people from Upper Italy were lucky that the government took such good care of them.”4 One of these former settlers contended that “our governor, a Fascist, was a really good man.”5 “If only the war had not broken out!” sighed one of my female interviewees, recalling her exciting youth in Libya.6
I would like to thank John Cady, Sheyda Jahanbani, Tom Lewin, and Mark Roseman for their helpful comments.
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Notes
See Paul Corner, “Italian Fascism: Whatever Happened to Dictatorship?,” The Journal of Modern History 74, no. 2 (June 2002): 325–51. Corner has repeatedly taken issue with the notion of consent and the concurrent whitewashing of Mussolini’s regime. See also
Corner, “Fascist Italy in the 1930s: Popular Opinion in the Provinces,” in Popular Opinion in Totalitarian Regimes: Fascism, Nazism, Communism, ed. Corner (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 122–46.
See, among others, Mimmo Franzinelli, Delatori: Spie e confidenti anonimi: L’arma segreta del regime fascista (Milan: Mondadori, 2001);
Mauro Canali, Le spie del regime (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2004); and
Michael Ebner, Ordinary Violence in Mussolini’s Italy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011).
Much of the literature on consensus has focused more narrowly on the immaterial incentives on offer. See David Roberts, “Myth, Style, Substance and the Totalitarian Dynamic in Fascist Italy,” Contemporary European History 16, no. 1 (2007): 1–36; and
Yong Woo Kim, “From ‘Consensus Studies’ to History of Subjectivity: Some Considerations on Recent Historiography on Italian Fascism,” Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions 10, no. 3–4 (2009): 327–37.
For a discussion of the relative importance of benefits (or the lack thereof) in the construction of consensus, see Corner, “Consenso e coercizione: L’opinione popolare nella Germania nazista e nell’Italia fascista,” Contemporanea 6, no. 3 (July 2003): 440–41. The historiography on Italy’s economic performance during the Fascist years has highlighted the low level of growth, the increase in social inequality, and a drop in (or at the very least, a leveling off of) real wages. See, among many others,
Gianni Toniolo, L’economia dell’Italia fascista (Rome: Laterza, 1980).
For an overview of the Italian presence in Libya, see Angelo Del Boca, Gli Italiani in Libia, vol. 1, Tripoli Bel Suol D’Amore (Rome: Laterza, 1986);
Del Boca, Gli Italiani in Libia, vol. 2, Dal Fascismo a Gheddafi (Rome: Laterza, 1986); and
Nicola Labanca, Oltremare: Storia dell’espansione coloniale italiana (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2002).
On the Fascist settlement program, see Claudio G. Segrè, Fourth Shore: The Italian Colonization of Libya (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974);
èFederico Cresti, Oasi di Italianità: La Libia della colonizzazione agraria tra fascismo, guerra e indipendenza (1935–1956) (Turin: Società Editrice Internazionale, 1996); and
Roberta Pergher, “Between Colony and Nation on Italy’s ‘Fourth Shore,’” in National Belongings: Hybridity in Italian Colonial and Postcolonial Cultures, ed. Jacqueline Andall and Derek Duncan (New York: Peter Lang, 2010), 89–106.
For a detailed description of the built environment, see Vittoria Capresi, L’utopia costruita. I centri rurali di fondazione in Libia (1934–1940)—The Built Utopia: The Italian Rural Centers Founded in Colonial Libya (1934–1940) (Bologna: Bononia University Press, 2009).
On the brutal methods employed against the Libyan resistance, see Eric Salerno, Genocidio in Libia (Milano: Sugar Ed., 1979);
Labanca, ed., Un nodo: Immagini e documenti sulla repressione coloniale italiana in Libia (Rome: Piero Lacaita Editore, 2002);
Ali Abdullatif Ahmida, Forgotten Voices: Power and Agency in Colonial and Postcolonial Libya (New York: Routledge, 2005); and
Ahmida, “When the Subaltern Speak: Memory of Genocide in Colonial Libya 1929 to 1933,” Italian Studies 61, no. 2 (Autumn 2006): 176–90. A vivid, contemporary account of the suffering of the Libyan population can be found in
Knud Holmboe, Desert Encounter: An Adventurous Journey through Italian Africa (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1937).
The literature on regional variations and local experiences of Fascism in Italy has a long tradition. See, among the more recent publications, “Faschimus in der Provinz,” ed. Hans Heiss and Wolfgang Meixner, special issue, Geschichte und Region/Storia e regione 8 (1999); Corner, “Everyday Fascism in the 1930s: Centre and Periphery in the Decline of Mussolini’s Dictatorship,” Contemporary European History 15, no. 2 (2006): 195–222; and
Tommaso Baris, Il fascismo in provincia: Politica e società a Frosinone, 1919–1940 (Rome: Laterza, 2007).
Alf Lüdtke, Eigen-Sinn: Fabrikalltag, Arbeitererfahrungen und Politik vom Kaiserreich bis in den Faschismus (Hamburg: Ergebnisse Verlag, 1993).
For a scholarly discussion of Italo Balbo, see the biographies by Giorgio Rochat, Italo Balbo (Turin: UTET, 1986);
Claudio G. Segrè, Italo Balbo: A Fascist Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987); and
Giordano Bruno Guerri, Italo Balbo (Milan: Mondadori, 1998).
On the topic of Fascist Italy’s interests in the Arab world, see Lisa Anderson, The State and Social Transformation in Tunisia and Libya, 1830–1980 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986);
Renzo De Felice, Il fascismo e l’Oriente: Arabi, ebrei e indiani nella politica di Mussolini (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1988);
James H. Burgwyn, Italian Foreign Policy in the Interwar Period, 1918–1940 (Westport: Praeger, 1997); and
Nir Arielli, Fascist Italy and the Middle East, 1933–40 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).
Ann Laura Stoler, Carole McGranahan, and Peter C. Perdue, eds., Imperial Formations (Santa Fe: School for Advanced Research Press, 2007);
Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper, eds., Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010).
See, among many others, Ruth Ben-Ghiat’s excellent study Fascist Modernities: Italy, 1922–1945 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). See also
Mabel Berezin, Making the Fascist Self: The Political Culture of Interwar Italy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997); and
Marla Stone, The Patron State: Culture and Politics in Fascist Italy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998).
For an interpretation of Fascism as a totalitarian project and a political religion, see Emilio Gentile, “Fascism as Political Religion,” Journal of Contemporary History 25, no. 2–3 (1990): 229–51; and
Gentile, The Sacralization of Politics in Fascist Italy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996). Gentile, however, does not use the concept of negotiation as he is less concerned with the reception of the Fascist message than its content and style.
On “colonial nostalgia,” see the influential article by Renato Rosaldo, “Imperialist Nostalgia,” in “Memory and Counter-Memory,” special issue, Representations 26 (Spring 1989): 107–22. See also
Paul Gilroy, Postcolonial Melancholia (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006).
See R. J. B. Bosworth, “Coming to Terms with Fascism in Italy,” History Today 55, no. 11 (November 2005): 18–20;
Andrea Mammone, “A Daily Revision of the Past: Fascism, Anti-Fascism, and Memory in Contemporary Italy,” Modern Italy 11, no. 2 (June 2006): 211–26; and
Robert Ventresca, “Debating the Meaning of Fascism in Contemporary Italy,” Modern Italy 11, no. 2 (June 2006): 189–209.
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© 2012 Giulia Albanese and Roberta Pergher
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Pergher, R. (2012). The Consent of Memory. In: Albanese, G., Pergher, R. (eds) In the Society of Fascists. Italian and Italian American Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230392939_9
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