Agonistic Interventions into Public Commemorative Art:An Innovative Form of Counter-memorial Practice?

In light of recent controversies around the removal or modification of public commemorative art, such as memorials and monuments, this paper interrogates the value of competing approaches to counter-memorial practice using the framework of agonistic memory. It argues that much counter-memorial practice today, as it relates to historical memory, is dominated by a “cosmopolitan” mode that fails to offer a convincing response to the rise of right-wing populism and its instrumentalization of conflicts over public commemorative art. The article investigates two case studies of counter-memorial interventions that focus on the memory of fascism in Europe today and seeks to identify and assess emergent agonistic practices

Fascist modernities: Italy, 1922-1945

Ruth Ben-Ghiat's innovative cultural history of Mussolini's dictatorship is a provocative discussion of the meanings of modernity in interwar Italy. Eloquent, pathbreaking, and deft in its use of a broad range of materials, this work argues that fascism appealed to many Italian intellectuals as a new model of modernity that would resolve the contemporary European crisis as well as long-standing problems of the national past. Ben-Ghiat shows that - at a time of fears over the erosion of national and social identities - Mussolini presented fascism as a movement that would allow economic development without harm to social boundaries and national traditions. She demonstrates that although the regime largely failed in its attempts to remake Italians as paragons of a distinctly fascist model of mass society, twenty years of fascism did alter the landscape of Italian cultural life. Among younger intellectuals in particular, the dictatorship left a legacy of practices and attitudes that often continued under different political rubrics after 1945

The First Comedy Italian Style

Un'analisi della commedia italiana durante il fascism