Hostname: page-component-76fb5796d-45l2p Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-25T15:05:16.668Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The anatomy of controversy, from Charlottesville to Rome

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 March 2019

Joshua Arthurs
Joshua Arthurs*
Affiliation:
Department of History, West Virginia University, Morgantown, USA
*
*Email: Joshua.Arthurs@mail.wvu.edu
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This article compares two recent memory controversies in the United States and Italy – the removal of the Robert E. Lee statue in Charlottesville, Virginia and the Legge Fiano, the abortive ban on Fascist propaganda proposed by Emanuele Fiano and the Partito Democratico – in order to identify a common set of challenges now confronting liberal democracies on both sides of the Atlantic. While acknowledging the longue durée of memory politics surrounding the Confederacy and Fascism respectively, the article argues that disputes over their monuments and symbols must also be situated in terms of contemporary debates over national identity, race, populism, citizenship and speech.

Italian summary

Attraverso un paragone tra due controversie recenti negli Stati Uniti e nell’Italia – la rimozione della statua del generale sudista Robert E. Lee a Charlottesville, Virginia e il dibattito sulla Legge Fiano contro l’apologia del fascismo – questo articolo esamina una serie di sfide affrontate da democrazie liberali da entrambi i lati dell’Atlantico. Anche riconoscendo la ‘lunga durata’ della politica della memoria, sia del sudismo che del fascismo, l’autore colloca queste polemiche nel contesto di dibattiti attuali attorno all’identità nazionale, il razzismo, il populismo, e i diritti di cittadinanza e di libera espressione.

Keywords

ItalyFascismmemoryUnited StatesConfederacymonumentspopulism
Type
Special Issue
Information
Modern Italy , Volume 24 , Issue 2: Special Issue: The Difficult Heritage of Italian Fascism , May 2019 , pp. 123 - 138
Copyright
© 2019 Association for the Study of Modern Italy 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Allert, T. 2008. The Hitler Salute: On the Meaning of a Gesture. New York: Metropolitan Books.Google Scholar
Arthurs, J. 2010. ‘Fascism as “Heritage” in Contemporary Italy’. In Italy Today: the Sick Man of Europe, edited by A. Mammone and G. A. Veltri, 114–127. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Azaryahu, M. 1986. ‘Street Names and Political Identity: the Case of East Berlin’. Journal of Contemporary History 21 (4): 581–604.Google Scholar
Berezin, M. 2009. Illiberal Politics in Neoliberal Times: Culture, Security and Populism in the New Europe. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Betz, H-G. 2017. ‘The New Politics of Resentment’. In The Populist Radical Right: a Reader, edited by C. Mudde, 338–351. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Betz, H-G., and Johnson, C.. 2017. ‘Against the Current – Stemming the Tide: the Nostalgic Ideology of the Contemporary Radical Populist Right’. In The Populist Radical Right: a Reader, edited by C. Mudde, 68–82. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Biemann, A. D. 2018. ‘“Vae Victis!”: Antisemitism as Self-Victimization (and What Spinoza Knew about It)’. In Charlottesville 2017: the Legacy of Race and Inequity, edited by L. P. Nelson and C. N. Harold, 50–62. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press.Google Scholar
Blight, D. W. 2001. Race and Reunion: the Civil War in American Memory. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Brundage, W. F. 2008. The Southern Past: a Clash of Race and Memory. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press.Google Scholar
Cammelli, M. G. 2018. ‘The Legacy of Fascism in the Present: “Third Millennium Fascists” in Italy’. Journal of Modern Italian Studies 23 (2): 199–214.Google Scholar
Carter, N. and Martin, S. 2017. ‘The Management and Memory of Fascist Monumental Art in Postwar and Contemporary Italy: the Case of Luigi Montanarini’s Apotheosis of Fascism ’. Journal of Modern Italian Studies 22 (3): 338–364.Google Scholar
Cento Bull, A. 2016. ‘The Role of Memory in Populist Discourse: the Case of the Italian Second Republic’. Patterns of Prejudice 50 (3): 213–331.Google Scholar
Cento Bull, A. and Hansen, H. L.. 2016. ‘On Agonistic Memory’. Memory Studies 9.4: 390–404.Google Scholar
Chiarini, R. 2001. ‘L’integrazione passiva’. In La destra allo specchio: la cultura politica di Alleanza nazionale, edited by R. Chiarini and M. Maraffi, 13–42. Venice: Marsilio.Google Scholar
Coski, J. M. 2006. The Confederate Battle Flag: America’s Most Embattled Emblem. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Domenico, R. P. 1991. Italian Fascists on Trial, 1943-1948. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.Google Scholar
Evans, M. 2006. ‘Memories, Monuments, Histories: the Re-Thinking of the Second World War since 1989.’ National Identities 8 (4): 317–348.Google Scholar
Fabbri, F. 2008. Le origini della guerra civile. L’Italia dalla guerra al fascismo (1918-1921). Turin: UTET.Google Scholar
Fella, S. and Ruzza, C.. 2009. Re-Inventing the Italian Right: Territorial Politics, Populism and ‘Post-Fascism’. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Foot, J 2009. Italy’s Divided Memory. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.Google Scholar
Gamboni, D. 2006. ‘Preservation and Destruction, Oblivion and Memory’. In Negating the Image: Case Studies in Iconoclasm, edited by A. McClanan and J. Johnson, 163–177. Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing.Google Scholar
Germinario, F. 1999. L’altra memoria. L’estrema destra, Salò e la Resistenza. Turin: Bollati Boringhieri.Google Scholar
Goldfield, D. 2002. Still Fighting the Civil War: the American South and Southern History. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press.Google Scholar
Holmes, R. and Cagle, M. C.. 2000. ‘The Great Debate: White Support for and Black Opposition to the Confederate Battle Flag’. In Confederate Symbols in the Contemporary South, edited by J. M. Martinez, W. D. Richardson and R. McNinch-Su, 281–302. Gainesville: University Press of Florida.Google Scholar
Ignazi, P. 2005. ‘Legitimation and Evolution on the Italian Right Wing: Social and Ideological Repositioning of Alleanza Nazionale and the Lega Nord’. South European Society and Politics 10 (2): 333–349.Google Scholar
Levinson, S. 1998. Written in Stone: Public Monuments in Changing Societies. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Main, T. J. 2018. The Rise of the Alt-Right. Washington, DC: Brookings Institute Press.Google Scholar
Malone, H. 2017. ‘Legacies of Fascism: Architecture, Heritage and Memory in Contemporary Italy’. Modern Italy 22 (4): 1–26.Google Scholar
Mammone, A. 2009. ‘The Eternal Return? Faux Populism and Contemporarization of Neo-Fascism across Britain, France and Italy’. Journal of Contemporary European Studies 17 (2): 171–192.Google Scholar
Mammone, A. and Veltri, G. A.. 2007. ‘La memoria daltonica del fascismo’. Il Ponte 62 (3): 89–97.Google Scholar
Martinez, J. M. 2000. ‘Traditionalist Perspectives on Confederate Symbols’. In Confederate Symbols in the Contemporary South, edited by J. M. Martinez, W. D. Richardson and R. McNinch-Su, 243–280. Gainesville: University Press of Florida.Google Scholar
Martinez, J. M. and Harris, R. M.. 2000. ‘Graves, Worms, and Epitaphs: Confederate Monuments in the Southern Landscape’. In Confederate Symbols in the Contemporary South, edited by J. M. Martinez, W. D. Richardson, and R. McNinch-Su, 130–192. Gainesville: University Press of Florida.Google Scholar
Mudde, C. 2018. The Far Right in America. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Nolan, A. T. 1991. Lee Considered: General Robert E. Lee and Civil War History. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.Google Scholar
Nolan, A. T. 2000. ‘The Anatomy of the Myth’. In The Myth of the Lost Cause and Civil War History, edited by A. T. Nolan and G. W. Gallagher, 11–34. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.Google Scholar
Patton, J. S., ed. 1924. Proceedings of the Thirty-Seventh Annual Reunion of the Virginia Grand Camp Confederate Veterans, and of the 29th Reunion of the Sons of Confederate Veterans. Chattanooga, TN: Miche Company.Google Scholar
Pavone, C. 1991. Una guerra civile. Saggio storico sulla moralità nella Resistenza. Turin: Bollati Boringhieri.Google Scholar
Prince, K. M. 2004. Rally ’Round the Flag, Boys! South Carolina and the Confederate Flag. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press.Google Scholar
Quinn, M. 1994. The Swastika: Constructing the Symbol. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Raniolo, F. and Tarchi, M.. 2015. ‘The Political Right’. In The Routledge Handbook of Contemporary Italy, edited by A. Mammone, E. Giap Parini, and G. A. Veltri, 169–180. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Rensmann, L. and Schoeps, J. H., eds. 2010. Politics and Resentment: Antisemitism and Counter-Cosmopolitanism in the European Union. Leiden: Brill.Google Scholar
Rothberg, M. 2009. Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Schivelbusch, W. 2003. The Culture of Defeat: On National Trauma, Mourning, and Recovery. New York: Metropolitan Books.Google Scholar
Spencer, H. 2018. Summer of Hate: Charlottesville, USA. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press.Google Scholar
Stone, D. 2012. ‘Memory Wars in the ‘New Europe’. In The Oxford Handbook of Modern European History, edited by D. Stone, 714–731. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Trouillot, M-R. 1995. Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. Boston: Beacon Press.Google Scholar
Verdery, K. 1999. The Political Lives of Dead Bodies: Reburial and Postsocialist Change. New York: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
Vignati, R. 2001. ‘La memoria del fascismo’. In La destra allo specchio: la cultura politica di Alleanza nazionale, edited by R. Chiarini and M. Maraffi, 43–83. Venice: Marsilio.Google Scholar
Wolf, E. R. (1958) 2001. ‘The Virgin of Guadalupe: a Mexican National Symbol’. In Pathways of Power: Building an Anthropology of the Modern World, edited by S. Silverman and A. A. Yengoyan, 139–146. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar