Suchergebnisse

""Mussolini's Children" uses modern theories of race and biopolitics and the lens of state-mandated youth culture--elementary education and the auxiliary organizations designed to mold the minds and bodies of Italy's children between the ages of five and eleven--to understand the evolution of Fascist racism"--

This article employs the recently discovered memoir of Luigi Molina – the superintendent of schools in Italy's multilingual borderland of Trentino-Alto Adige/Südtirol from 1923 to 1944 – to demonstrate the sizeable and problematic rift between purportedly 'common-sense' understandings of 'Italian-ness' (italianità) as they were manifested in Italy's newly annexed Alpine territory and in Rome. In particular, the author focuses on the state's treatment of the region's Italian speakers (trentini) in its attempts to 'Italianise' their German-speaking neighbours and solidify fascist control of Italy's northern border. Ultimately, Molina's recollections recount how Rome's struggles to articulate and implement clear and consistent criteria for Italianisation led to the weakening of regional officials' moral authority, political support and 'totalitarian' façade. The simultaneously vague and critical project of Italianisation did not simply illuminate fascism's inability to inculcate an 'Italian identity' among Tyroleans, however; it also served to highlight fundamental difficulties in defining national identities in any nation-state.

""Mussolini's Children" uses modern theories of race and biopolitics and the lens of state-mandated youth culture--elementary education and the auxiliary organizations designed to mold the minds and bodies of Italy's children between the ages of five and eleven--to understand the evolution of Fascist racism"--