The Reale Accademia D'italia and the Invention of a Fascist Africanism

Fascism 2 (2013) 161–182 brill.com/fasc ‘We Will Never Leave.’ The Reale Accademia d’Italia and the Invention of a Fascist Africanism Emanuel Rota University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign [email protected] Abstract At the beginning of November 1938 the Reale Accademia d’Italia, the official cultural institution of the Italian Fascist regime, organized a conference on Africa. Mussolini himself had chosen the theme for the conference and major Italian political figures, such as De Vecchi and Balbo, delivered papers, together with French, English and German politicians and scholars. The conference, organized in the same year of Hitler’s visit to Italy and of the introduction of the new racial laws, could have offered the cultural justification for a foreign policy alternative to the German turn taken by the regime. Only Mussolini’s last minute decision not to attend transformed the Convegno Volta on Africa from a potential alternative foreign policy into a forum where the dissenting voices within the regime voiced their opposition to German style racism. Keywords Italian Fascism; racism; anti-Semitism; Reale Accademia d’Italia; Fascist colonialism; Fascist Africanism The time of politics and the time of cultural production run at different speeds. In authoritarian and totalitarian regimes, where the political power can dic- tate the cultural agenda, the lack of synchronicity that characterizes these two different times can be a source of embarrassment for the political authorities, a space where the sudden turns of politics can reveal themselves as such. For this reason, the cultural events that a regime organizes to systematize its ideology can be invaluable ‘time machines’ for historians, who can look a these events to challenge the time frame produced by political authorities to legiti- mize their choices. The conference on Africa organized by the Reale Accademia d’Italia at the beginning of October 1938 is one of those time machines.1 1) For the history of the Reale Accademia d’Italia, see Gabriele Turi, ‘Le Accademie nell’Italia fascista,’ Belfagor 64 (1999): 403-424. © 2013 Emanuel Rota DOI 10.1163/22116257-00202004 This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported (CC-BY-NC 3.0) License. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ Downloaded from Brill.com09/29/2021 02:34:16PM via free access <UN> <UN> 162 E. Rota / Fascism 2 (2013) 161–182 When the one hundred and twenty-six people who participated in the conference on Africa arrived in Rome on October 4, 1938, the Fascist regime was in the process of promoting some of the key elements of its new racist policy. One of the central documents for the construction of the Italian racist regime, the declaration on race approved by the Gran Consiglio del Fascismo, was passed while the conference was holding its sections in Rome.2 The decree on ‘the defense of the Italian race’ was approved less than a month after the end of the conference on Africa. In this political context, the conference on Africa could have provided the regime with an intellectual systematization of its racism, giving the scientific legitimation that would have consecrated its biopolitical decisions.3 However, the long hiatus that necessarily exists between the organization of an international conference and its realization created a paradoxical effect for the Italian Fascists: the kind of racism that emerged from the conference was fairly coherent and systematized, but not in line with the new political decisions taken by Mussolini. Not only the hegemonic position that emerged among the Italian participants in the conference on Africa was far from the logic that was inspiring the racist laws, but the conference also became the stage where some important figures of the regime, Italo Balbo and Cesare De Vecchi, channeled their opposition to the new fascist racism. Italian Fascist colonialism Historians have long debated the question of the genesis of the racist policies in Fascist Italy. Since the fifties, Mussolini’s decision to adopt laws against the 2) A basic account of the racial laws of 1938 is to be found in Renzo De Felice, Storia degli Ebrei sotto il Fascismo (Turin: Einaudi, 1972). See also Meir Michaelis, Mussolini and the Jews: German- Italian Relations and the Jewish Question, 1922-1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978); and Gene Bernardini, ‘The Origins and Development of Racial Anti-Semitism in Fascist Italy,’ The Journal of Modern History 49 (1977): 431-453. For a more recent account of the regime’s anti- Semitism, see Enzo Collotti, ed., Fascismo e antifascismo: Rimozioni, revisioni, negazioni (Bari: Laterza, 2000); and Michele Sarfatti, Gli ebrei nell’Italia fascista: Vicende, identità (Turin: Einaudi, 2000). 3) Since Michel Foucault delivered his lectures at the College de France on the birth of biopolitics, the role of life in politics has been the center of attention for many political philosophers. Besides Foucault’s and Giorgio Agamben’s works, which are crucial to define biopolitics, in this article I am particularly in debt to Roberto Esposito’s notion of ‘immunity.’ Esposito’s sugges- tion that the protection of a community can lead to a political autoimmune disease that kills the community itself resonates well with Orestano’s theoretical framework for the conference on Africa. The idea that the life of the Italian and European communities put pressure on the European territory and caused wars unless directed to Africa seems to me a quintessentially biopolitical argument. Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978-1979, reprint edition (New York: Picador, 2010); Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Downloaded from Brill.com09/29/2021 02:34:16PM via free access <UN> <UN> E. Rota / Fascism 2 (2013) 161–182 163 Italian Jews has been scrutinized in the attempt to deny, or support, the thesis of the ideological affinity between Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. Emilio Gentile well summarizes the position of those who claim that racism was not part of the ideological core of Italian Fascism, stating that the Nazis understood the national community as ‘biological-racial,’ whereas the Italian Fascists saw the nation as an ‘idealistic-voluntaristic’ community.4 Italian Fascism, according to these scholars, was capable of racism, but since it was a nationalist movement, and its idea of the nation was not based on race, racism was not a central com- ponent of Italian Fascism. On the contrary, those who maintain an ideological affinity between Italian Fascism and Nazism claim, as Mark Neocleous does, that those who deny such an affinity ‘fail to register the fact that the biological racism and anti-Semitism emerges from the xenophobic nature of nationalism.’5 On both sides of the debate, and in the many positions that exist in between these two characterizations of Fascism, the question of racism is raised to understand the ideological kernel of the Italian Fascist regime. Since the historiographical problem has been to define the relationship between Italian Fascist ideology and the racist laws passed by the Italian regime, it is not surprising that the research has been mainly directed to the ultimate source of fascist ideology, Benito Mussolini, or to political theorists. What historians are still exploring, however, is how Italian Fascist doctors, anthropologists, geographers, historians and climatologists transformed the ideological choices of the regime into pseudo-scientific propositions.6 Contrary to other ideological representations of human communities, racism, at least the racism elabo- rated by intellectuals, needed to mimic scientific discourses, presenting itself as a form of objective knowledge, capable of connecting the concreteness of visi- ble evidences (e.g. the color of the skin) to hidden and mysterious causes. As Étienne Balibar has remarked,7 the effectiveness of racism rests on an inextrica- ble unity of misrepresentation and desire to know. For this reason, the elabora- tion of a coherent racist discourse requires the production of research that looks scientific. By 1938, this production was already well on the way to produce an Italian racist science with the official support of the regime, and yet this racist ‘science’ was not the one that the Fascist regime was turning into legislation in 1938. Power and Bare Life (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1998); Roberto Esposito, Bios: Biopolitics and Philosophy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008). 4) Emilio Gentile, Fascismo: Storia e Interpretazione (Bari: Laterza, 2002), 41. 5) Mark Neocleous, Fascism (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1997), 31-37. 6) In this direction, see Giorgio Israel and Pietro Nastasi, Scienza e razza nell’Italia fascista (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1998); Roberto Maiocchi, Scienza e Fascismo (Milano: Carocci 2004); Roberto Maiocchi, Scienza Italiana e Razzismo Fascista (Firenze: La Nuova Italia, 1999). 7) See in particular Étienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Classe (Paris: La Découverte, 1988). Downloaded from Brill.com09/29/2021 02:34:16PM via free access <UN> <UN> 164 E. Rota / Fascism 2 (2013) 161–182 At that point in history, however, explicit considerations about the foreign policy of the regime came into play and Mussolini’s decision not to attend the conference neutralized the efforts of those who were pushing not only for a different form of racism, but also for a different foreign policy. Perhaps racism needed to look like a science, as Balibar writes, but science, even a fake science like racism, was a secondary consideration for an ideology that put political considerations before anything else. This was clear for all the fascists, includ- ing those who organized the conference on Africa. Since the very first stages of the organization in 1936, in fact, it was clear that what was at stake with the Convegno was the support that a cultural initiative by the Accademia could lend to the foreign policy of the regime.

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