Fascism and historic representation: The 1932 Garibaldian celebrations

Journal of Contemporary History

Volumn 31, Issue 2, 1996, Pages 317-345

  Fogu, Claudio ^a  

^a OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 11744302926     PISSN: 00220094     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/002200949603100206     Document Type: Article

References (17)

1. Since Giorgio Ciucci's pioneering 'L'autorappresentazione del fascismo: la mostra del decennale della marcia su Roma' (published in Rassegna di Architettura, 4 [June 1982], 48-55), several excellent studies of the Mostra della Rivoluzione Fascista (MRF) have appeared, but none of them has given more than a passing reference to the relationship between the MRF and the Garibaldian celebrations. See Libera Andreotti, 'Art and Politics in Italy. The Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution' (PhD diss., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1989)
2. Gigliola Fioravanti (ed.), Archivio Centrale dello Stato: Partito Nazionale Fascista - Mostra della Rivoluzione Fascista, Pubblicazioni degli Archivi di Stato - Strumenti CIX (Roma 1990)
3. Maria Stone, 'The Politics of Cultural Production: the Exhibition in Fascist Italy, 1928-1942' especially chap. 5 (PhD diss., Princeton University, 1990), 236-319
4. Fabio Benzi, Mario Sironi. Il mito dell'architettura (Milano 1990), 142-9
5. Diane Ghirardo, 'Architects, Exhibitions, and the Politics of Culture in Fascist Italy', 67-75
6. Libera Andreotti, 'The Aesthetics of War: The Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution', 76-86
7. Jeffrey T. Schnapp, 'Fascism's Museum in Motion', 87-98
8. and Brian McLaren, 'Under the Sign of Reproduction', 98-106
9. Journal of Architectural Education (JAE) (February 1992)
10. Jeffrey T. Schnapp, 'Epic Demonstrations. Fascist Modernity and the 1932 Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution' in Fascism, Aesthetics, and Culture, ed. Richard J. Golsan (Hanover and London 1992), 1-37
11. Maria Stone, 'Staging Fascism: The Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution', Journal of Contemporary History, 28, 2 (April 1993), 215-43
12. Emilio Gentile, Il culto del Littorio, 197-260
13. Isnenghi, 'Usi politici', 537
14. Cardano, 'Per una storia', 223
15. Emporium, 367, 369 (Roma 1925)
16. Gilles Deleuze has explored the intimate relationship between the modern experience of temporality afforded by film and the Bergsonian concept of duration. 'Matter and Memory', writes Deleuze in reference to Bergson's major work, 'was the diagnosis of a crisis in psychology. Movement, as physical reality in the external world, and the image, as psychic reality in consciousness, could no longer be opposed.' Gilles Deleuze, Cinema I: The Movement-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis 1983), cited in M.K. Matsuda, 'The Body of the Philosopher: the Ethics of Memory, Mythology, and the Modern', Strategies, 4/5 (1991), 134-50. In this article Matsuda describes Bergsonian memory as translating 'both the intensities of spontaneous action and the timeless grandeur of the classical past into fleeting moment', (143); a definition for which Sciortino's Anita could serve as a fitting icon
17. Following and connecting Carlo Ginzburg's remarks on the rhetorical origins of modern historical culture and the modern concept of'representation' put forward in two separate essays, I consider the adjective 'historic' as the heir to the Greek rhetorical figure of graphike enàrgeia, which the Latins translated as evidentia in narratione, and we would render in English as 'making something present, vivid, palpable' by means of narrative or images. In this respect, I see the fascist attempt to name and isolate the 'historic' in history as the sign of a deep-seated - and by no means extinguished - quest which has dominated the development of Latin-Christian culture and imagery: the quest for evidentia in imagine. See Carlo Ginzburg's 'Montrer et citer. La vérité de l'histoire', Le Débat, 56 (September- October 1989), 43-54, and 'Représentation: le mot, l'idée, la chose', Annales ESC, 6 (November-December 1991), 1219-34