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

The First Comedy Italian Style

Un'analisi della commedia italiana durante il fascism

Clio among the Camicie Nere

What was the impact of Fascism on the Italian historical profession? From the 1930s through the early 1940s, Italian scholars loyal to the regime could count on a government that supported their work both in the universities and through the establishment of new research institutions. This academic infrastructure served an emerging generation of historians who had begun their careers under the dictatorship, trained by masters who were sympathetic to the Fascist cause. In some of their writings they would come to closely reflect the regime’s political and ideological priorities, particularly with respect to foreign policy. These historians would reevaluate the country’s geopolitical position since the Risorgimento, as well as Italy’s place in Europe and the Mediterranean, in a way that dovetailed with the regime’s ideology of colonial conquest and national grandeur. As Fascism strived to fulfill these historians’ interpretations of Italy’s “destiny,” they in turn distilled and enunciated visions of an Italian world power. This chapter will analyze the intellectual discourse prevalent in the universities, in order to assess the various ways in which Fascist beliefs were gradually assimilated, consciously or unconsciously, by different generations. I will thus examine the reception of Fascist foreign policy objectives not only in the lectures and writings of major Italian historians but also in the tesi di laurea (senior theses) of their young students