Mussolini's Nature
Mussolini's Nature

Author: Marco Armiero

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2022-12-13

Total Pages: 263

ISBN-13: 0262372398

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This exploration of the environmental practices of Benito Mussolini’s fascist regime invites readers to consider the ecological connections of all political projects. “We might think we see a mountain while it was a war; a forest can actually be an engine; a monument to workers might reflect the violence of a colonial empire.”—extracted from Mussolini’s Nature In this first environmental history of Italian fascism, Marco Armiero, Roberta Biasillo, and Wilko Graf von Hardenberg reveal that nature and fascist rhetoric are inextricable. Mussolini’s Nature explores fascist political ecologies, or rather the practices and narratives through which the regime constructed imaginary and material ecologies functional to its political project. The book does not pursue the ghost of a green Mussolini by counting how many national parks were created during the regime or how many trees planted. Instead, the reader is trained to recognize fascist political ecology in Mussolini’s speeches, reclaimed landscapes, policies of economic self-sufficiency, propaganda documentaries, reforested areas, and in the environmental transformation of its colonial holdings. The authors conclude with an examination of the role of fascist landscapes in the country’s postwar reconstruction: Mussolini’s nature is still visible today through plaques, monuments, toponomy, and the shapes of landscapes. This original, and surprisingly intimate, environmental history is not merely a chronicle of conservation in fascist Italy but also an invitation to consider the socioecological connections of all political projects.

Italy's Margins
Italy's Margins

Author: David Forgacs

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2014-03-27

Total Pages: 339

ISBN-13: 1139868144

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Italy's Margins explores how certain places and social groups in Italy have been defined as marginal or peripheral since unification. This marginalization involves not only concrete policies but also ways of perceiving people and places as outside society's centre. The author looks closely at how photography and writing have supported political and social exclusion and, conversely, how they have been enlisted to challenge it. Five cases are examined: the peripheries of Italy's major cities after unification; its East African colonies in the 1930s; the less developed areas of its south in the 1950s; its psychiatric hospitals before the reforms of the late 1970s; and its 'nomad camps' after 2000. Each chapter takes its lead from a symptomatic photograph and is followed by other pictures and extracts from written texts. These allow the reader to examine how social marginalization is discursively performed by cultural products.

Everything Is Possible
Everything Is Possible

Author: Joseph Fronczak

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2023-01-24

Total Pages: 361

ISBN-13: 0300268599

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The fascinating history of how the antifascist movement of the 1930s created “the left” as we know it today In the middle years of the Great Depression, the antifascist movement became a global political force, powerfully uniting people from across divisions of ideology, geography, race, language, and nationality. Joseph Fronczak shows how socialists, liberals, communists, anarchists, and others achieved a semblance of unity in the fight against fascism. Depression-era antifascists were populist, militant, and internationalist. They understood fascism in global terms, and they were determined to fight it on local terms. In the United States, antifascists fought against fascism on the streets of cities such as Chicago and New York, and they connected their own fights to the ones raging in Germany, Italy, and Spain. As he traces the global trajectory of the antifascist movement, Fronczak argues that its most significant legacy is its creation of “the left” as we know it today: an international conglomeration of people committed to a shared politics of solidarity.

Social Justice in Twentieth-Century Europe
Social Justice in Twentieth-Century Europe

Author: Martin Conway

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2024-02-29

Total Pages: 295

ISBN-13: 1009370820

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Social justice has returned to the heart of political debate in present-day Europe. But what does it mean in different national histories and political regimes, and how has this changed over time? This book provides the first historical account of the evolution of notions of social justice across Europe since the late nineteenth century. Written by an international team of leading historians, the book analyses the often-divergent ways in which political movements, state institutions, intellectual groups, and social organisations have understood and sought to achieve social justice. Conceived as an emphatically European analysis covering both the eastern and western halves of the continent, Social Justice in Twentieth-Century Europe demonstrates that no political movement ever held exclusive ownership of the meaning of social justice. Conversely, its definition has always been strongly contested, between those who would define it in terms of equality of conditions, or of opportunity; the security provided by state authority, or the freedom of personal initiative; the individual rights of a liberal order, or the social solidarities of class, nation, confession, or Volk.