Between 1938 and 1943, Fascist intellectuals debated the problem of how to create a racial policy that would encompass the Japanese within the Aryan doctrine. This article demonstrates how internal divisions in the Fascist party over racial issues generated alternative versions of pro-Japanese propaganda, which influenced the racial thinking of the Italian far-right even long after the Second World War. I show how Italian racial theories developed to underpin the alliance with Japan were transnational in scope, as they involved both German and Italian scholars in a common effort to lobby state racial policies. Specifically, I consider George Montandon and Julius Evola as two transnational actors engaged in building a case for the inclusion of the Japanese in the family of Aryan races, speaking either from a ‘biological’ or ‘spiritual’ perspective. While by the end of the Second World War the ‘biological’ thesis for the inclusion of the Japanese race had evaporated, the ‘spiritual’ thesis would continue to influence a generation of Italian far-right militants, especially during the ‘Years of Lead’. To make sense of this legacy, I suggest that the foundational myth of Italian Fascism, based on the spiritual heritage of the multiethnic Roman empire, responded to the neofascist quest for transnational affiliations against Western materialism.

Comics are an increasingly popular medium in the twenty-first century. Combining words and images, comics enable the expression of individual and collective histories that straddle languages and cultures, reflecting the multimodality of the cognitive and narrative processes in a multilingual, globalising world. This article proposes an original framework to understand the power of comics as a transcultural medium by exploring the production of Takoua Ben Mohamed, a graphic journalist and comics author born in Tunisia and raised in Rome. These comics visualise histories of migration and translation in Italy and the Mediterranean, questioning notions of homogeneity, authenticity and canonicity of Italian memory and culture. The article engages with the theoretical and methodological framework of the Transnationalizing Modern Languages (TML) research project, exploring the interconnected linguistic and cultural dimensions of memory and translation. The analysis identifies a series of processes termed mediation-translation in Ben Mohamed's comics, which illuminate the constitutive nature of memory and translation in contemporary processes of identification.

The Fascist model of exhibiting power and placing it in museum settings had its origins in the Liberal exhibitions of the late nineteenth century, and in the first exhibitions devoted to the Risorgimento. However, the regime's museum initiatives were numerous, innovative and varied, and many of them have not yet been adequately investigated; those launched in Italy's colonies, in particular, remain largely unexplored. This article highlights the surprisingly extensive network of museums and temporary exhibitions that Fascism initiated in Italian possessions abroad, involving prominent figures from the regime and contemporary culture, and shows how science, culture and nation-building (in both the colonies and the mother country, and between them) were interwoven in the Fascist museological project for the colonies.

This article examines Paolo Sorrentino's portrayal of moral degradation and pursuit of power in his twin biopics about Silvio Berlusconi: Loro 1 and Loro 2 (2018). It does so by performing a psychological reading of Sorrentino's representation of Berlusconi, as someone suffering from a personality disorder characterised by excessive power striving. It argues that this obsession with power also affects most of the films’ characters, who become obsessed with entering Berlusconi's inner circle – the pinnacle of wealth and power in a neoliberal society. In particular, it argues that their power striving circulates ‘virally’ in the film's narrative; the characters are willing to do anything to befriend their idol and attain absolute power. The ensuing analysis shows that Sorrentino's portrayal of Berlusconi – as the embodiment of a highly dysfunctional and obsessive, viral quest for power – comes to represent the deep pervasiveness of corruption, hedonism and commodification that marked the Second Republic.

This essay focuses on the racialising devices that characterise some Italian colonial novels. Specifically, it looks at two novels of the late 1920s – Enrico Cappellina's Un canto nella notte. Romanzo coloniale and Guido Milanesi's La sperduta di Allah – with the aim of highlighting the continuities and discontinuities between the racist models they endorse. A critical close reading of the texts reveals the degree of interconnection between segregationist and inclusivist interpretations of the cross-racial colonial encounter in the first half of the ventennio. With this perspective, the 1936 imperial turning point, even though critical on the institutional level, appears less so in the cultural field of racist production.

Historical research acknowledges only cursorily the Catholic contribution to eugenics. Yet there is a substantial link between Catholic discourses on morality and the emergence of Italian eugenics. In this essay I argue that sexual normalisation was a key source of consensus. Masculine and patriarchal values strengthened the strategic collaboration between Fascist demographic policies, the Italian interpretation of eugenics, and Catholic doctrine. I draw on archival and printed material to show that the control of public morality and the support for reproduction met both Catholic and Fascist interests. In particular, I focus on the alliance between the State and the Catholic Church working against ‘the contraceptive mentality’. Mussolini wanted to stimulate religious sentiment as a basis for the fight against depopulation. The Catholic Church desired a set of laws against immorality, birth control and abortion. In this way, Fascism and the Catholic Church found a solid cultural agreement around restoring traditional mores, patriarchal values, and gender hierarchy.

Hip hop, reggae/raggamuffin, and fusions between these genres, emerged in the Italian island of Sardinia in the 1980s and 1990s. In this article, we examine the ways in which these transnational music forms have found fertile terrain in post-colonial Sardinia across generations and cultures through the music of the historic hip hop crew, Sa Razza, the next generation ‘rappamuffin’ artist, Randagiu Sardu, and the Senegalese-Sardinian Afro-reggae musician, Momar Gaye. Through the analysis of selected tracks and video clips we explore how overlapping cultural, social, and political discourses of decolonisation are framed and narrated through language, music, and images as a means of expressing cultural and political agency, critiquing the impacts of exploitation and colonisation, and consciously and self-reflexively reinterpreting and celebrating marginality.

The linguistic and cultural identity of transnational writers who choose to write in an adopted language or to self-translate, has gained increasing interest among researchers over the last decade. Approaches to the topic have ranged from textual analyses of translingual narratives and language memoirs to more ontological investigations of the processes of identity-formation in transcultural frameworks. Acknowledging that there is no one-to-one correspondence between linguistic units and ethnic, social or cultural formations, this paper considers the relationship between the literary practices of contemporary translingual writers and the role of language both in the formation of personal identities and in the reconfiguration of constructions of national identity and literary belonging. Specifically, I examine how two contemporary women writers, Francesca Marciano and Jhumpa Lahiri, who each represent a remarkable case of self-conscious linguistic transformation, interrogate the traditional construct of a monolingual, mono-ethnic and mono-cultural national identity. I argue that their autofictions reflect the multilingual and transcultural reality of contemporary transnational literature and instantiate broader issues connected with the definition, categorisation and consequent evaluation of literary canons and literary citizenship.

In an article with the challenging title ‘Against Realism’, Alan O'Leary and Catherine O'Rawe (2011) argued that Italian cinema studies needed to move forward. In their view, the abuse of ‘realism’ as a prescriptive as well as descriptive term had stunted research into Italian cinema of the postwar period, channelling it exclusively towards neorealist trends and thus devaluing study of the other forms, movements, auteurs and productions that emerged during the same period. This historiographical tendency, which Christopher Wagstaff aptly called the ‘institution of neorealism’ (2007, 37), encouraged the development of reverential study and by the 1960s had assumed the form of a canon. While the position taken by O'Leary and O'Rawe was certainly provocative, it has served to stimulate thinking about the areas of postwar Italian cinema that had remained in the shadows and unexplored. Starting to focus on an ‘other’ cinema has not had to mean ‘forgetting’ neorealism, but has brought changes to the way that it is studied. Almost ten years later, the challenge seems to be to rethink neorealism as a transnational phenomenon that straddles different periods, genres and contexts; while it has its roots in postwar European culture, it continues to be influential on a global level.

This article reconsiders the development of Fascist architecture throughout the late interwar period. It pays especial attention to the structures erected for the most significant international expositions held, or planned to be held, between 1933 and 1942, in order to identify significant trends in Party-sponsored design. It argues that the ‘dynamism’ of Fascist design was a consequence of the regime's preference for an increasingly imperial tone which developed in direct proportion to its increasingly imperial identity. It points to Piacentini and Pagano's Italian Pavilion built for the 1937 Paris Exposition, the first national pavilion constructed following the May 1936 proclamation of empire, as a significant flashpoint in the tension between Fascist interpretations of modern and classical design. This article concludes that the often-overlooked world's fair buildings can be viewed as crystalline distillations of the stylistic experimentation which defined the broader Fascist building programme both in Italy and abroad.