Rosetta Giuliani Caponetto. Fascist Hybridities: Representations of Racial Mixing and
Diaspora Cultures under Mussolini. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. 199 pp.
$90.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-137-48184-9.
Reviewed by Beatrice Sica (University College London)
Published on H-Nationalism (November, 2016)
Commissioned by Cristian Cercel
As the subtitle indicates, Fascist Hybridities deals with
the “representations of racial mixing and diaspora cultures under Mussolini.” In particular, as Rosetta Giuliani Caponetto explains in the introduction, “Fascist Hybridities examines how Italian literature and cinema of
the 1930s are traversed by the hybrid figures of meticci
and Levantines” (p. 4). Drawing on a number of studies on Italian colonialism, Fascist racism, the representation of black and meticci people in Mussolini’s Italy, and
the presence of Italian Levantines in Egyptian Alexandria, and using in particular Homi Bhabha’s notion of
mimicry, Caponetto sets out to analyze the relationship
between “narrative strategies” of the works she considers “and the political climate of the time” (p. 4). Her
aim is to “reveal the inconsistencies within Fascist ideals of racial and cultural purity” by bringing “to light
how literary and cinematic devices used to stigmatize
colonial meticci and Levantines often undermine themselves” and to show “how certain images pressed into
ideological service escaped their initial purposes, releasing unintended meanings” (p. 5). Chapter 1 provides
an overview of Italy’s colonial history and legislation
on interracial unions and biracial offsprings and focuses
on three (children’s) colonial novels, Rosolino Gabrielli’s
Il piccolo Brassa (1928) and Arnaldo Cipolla’s Balilla regale (1935) and Melograno d’oro. Regina d’Etiopia (1936).
Chapter 2 addresses the figure of the Levantine and the
“dissident literature of Fausta Cialente and Enrico Pea”
(p. 18). Chapter 3 deals with propaganda cinema and examines Augusto Genina’s Lo squadrone bianco (1936) and
Guido Brignone’s Sotto la croce del sud (1938). Chapter 4
goes beyond Fascism, looking at Levantines and biracial
offspring in postwar Italy.
The work is well grounded on historical studies on
Fascist colonialism and racism, but for a book devoted
to narrative strategies in the literature and cinema of the
period, the number of primary sources that have been
used seems too limited. Moreover, the kind of works
analyzed do not seem always in line with the conclusions drawn, or these are drawn too hastily based on
those works. For example, in order to illustrate the colonial novel, Caponetto uses three novels for children and
young readers, but does not clarify her use of this particular subcategory. Instead, she moves from her analysis
of the three examples within this subcategory to making
points on the colonial genre as a whole and on literature
in general under Fascism (see pp. 42-43; “The children’s
colonial novel, like its adult counterpart,” p. 44; pp. 4950; “A reading of colonial novels like Il piccolo Brassa and
Melograno d’oro clearly shows how Fascist propaganda
literature …,” p. 53; “a close reading of these novels reveals that the literature affiliated with the Fascist regime
failed to condemn misgeneation,” p. 53). Likewise, discussing Pea’s and Cialente’s works that depict the lives of
Italian characters in the cosmopolitan Egyptian Alexandria only to argue that “the phenomenon of Italians ‘going native’ undermined the unspoken goals of the demographic colonization in Ethiopia” (p. 65) seems out of focus. The author herself recognizes that “Alexandria was
not an Italian colony but an Italian emigrant destination
during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries” (p. 66),
so why choose these works? Studies of Italian literature
under Fascism have clarified how varied the picture of
Italian literature was under Mussolini’s rule, so it is not a
big surprise to see that alongside the Fascist (children’s)
colonial literature there was also space for Pea’s and Cia1
H-Net Reviews
lente’s narratives: the two were just two different literary
products (not to say that in the eyes of the regime’s censors, depicting the unhappy existence of Italians living
outside Italy and its colonies might have appeared beneficial to the Fascist cause).
Overall, the reader of this study is presented with a
flattened idea of literature and cinema. While it is true
that propaganda works generally do not offer many nuances to their readers/viewers and divide the world into
black and white, it is also true that narrative works come
with their own devices and strategies to capture the readers’ attention, and these become apparent especially in
a popular/children/propaganda context. Thus, although
the regime preached that Fascist men should control their
erotic desires, we know that, as Caponetto herself recognizes, there is always “the pleasure derived from transgression” (p. 52), so how can we be so sure that, for example, “Cipolla’s narrative strategy unintentionally transforms the reader into a voyeur” (p. 52)? It seems likely
that Cipolla did want the desire to see the Ethiopian girl
Melograno to remain central to the text. In sum, the book
addresses an important issue–the visibility and representation of meticci and Levantine characters in narrative
works produced under Fascism–but would have benefited from a wider range of sources and a more nuanced
picture of the actual literary and cinematic production in
Italy in the interwar years.
One way for the author to make her points stronger
would have been to look at how the works she analyzes
were received and at the circulation and reviews that
they had. But Caponetto does not delve into this kind
of evidence, which somehow undermines her argument
(“it is unclear if the authors truly succeed in encouraging their Italian characters and readers to feel superior
to the black protagonist and preventing them from realizing that they do not correspond to the ideal image
constructed by the plot,” p. 43). Only for Brignone’s La
croce del sud Caponetto reports that “the film received
significant criticism in Fascist circles for its ambiguous
portrayal of the character of Paolo” (p. 121), but here she
relies on secondary sources and does not give examples
of this heated debate, which would have provided a good
example of anxieties and negotiations in Fascist Italy on
these issues.
If there is additional discussion of this review, you may access it through the network, at:
https://networks.h-net.org/h-nationalism
Citation: Beatrice Sica. Review of Caponetto, Rosetta Giuliani, Fascist Hybridities: Representations of Racial Mixing
and Diaspora Cultures under Mussolini. H-Nationalism, H-Net Reviews. November, 2016.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=46764
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoncommercialNo Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
2