Special Issue: Fascism, Gender, and Culture
Introduction: Fascism, Gender, and Culture
Ara H. Merjian
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:
In the wake of a post-World War II, leftist intellectual reckoning which needed to distance its politically suspect forebears, the notion that fascist ideologues permitted — indeed encouraged — diverse, often revolutionary aesthetic projects seemed an outrageous, even perverse proposition. Renato Poggioli's The Theory of the Avant Garde (1962), for example, which undertook to define traditional culture vis-a-vis its radical (and righteous) ideological counterpart, contended that
“A totalitarian order opposes avant-garde art not only by official and concrete acts, for example preventing the import of foreign products of that art or the exhibition of a rare and accidental indigenous product, but also by, first of all, creating, almost unwillingly, a cultural and spiritual atmosphere which makes the flowering of that art, even when restricted to marginal and private forms, unthinkable even more than materially impossible.”
Along the same lines, the influential postwar critic Clement Greenberg asserted that "the main trouble with avant-garde art and literature, from the main point of view of Fascists and Stalinists, is not that they are too critical, but that they are too 'innocent,' that it is too difficult to inject effective propaganda into them," while another well-known cultural critic similarly posited that "the dictatorships of right and left have [only] generated the anemic products of enforced enlightenment.”
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Articles
Fascist Puerility
Barbara Spackman
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:
In Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson looks back to a fleeting moment when the nation was felt to be new. For Anderson, the Declaration of Independence marks the historical juncture when the nation is not yet imagined as arising out of the immemorial past, but rather conjured as emerging from a radical break with that past. The absolute novelty of this moment quickly spread, he claims, from New World to Old, and the French revolution likewise felt itself to be a blasting open of the continuum of history. "Nothing exemplifies this intuition better," he writes, "than the decision, taken by the Convention Nationale on 5 October 1793, to scrap the centuries old Christian calendar and to inaugurate a new world-era with the Year One, starting from the abolition of the ancien régime and the Proclamation of the Republic on 22 September 1792." In a parenthetical remark, Anderson adds that "no subsequent revolution has had quite this sublime confidence of novelty, not least because the French Revolution has always been seen as an ancestor." To be sure, if one understands "revolution" to be a violent change of the political and social order that places itself, by definition, in a genealogical line that includes the French Revolution, then Anderson is no doubt right. But no one who works on Italian Fascism can read this passage without finding herself pulled up short, for fascism, too, had some of that "sublime confidence." As a self-proclaimed revolution that rejected the philosophical heritage of the French Revolution (even as it mimed one of its inaugural gestures), it, too, scrapped the Christian calendar and began anew. Year One for the Fascist regime began on 29 October, 1922, the day after the March on Rome, which was celebrated throughout the ventennio as the insurrectional act that brought fascism to power and set fascist time in motion.
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A Fascist Feminine
Andrew Hewitt
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:
Most studies of fascism, when speaking of gender relations, adhere to the model of fascism as patriarchalism, and only recently have historians moved beyond such uncoupling couplings as "women and fascism" or "women's responses to fascism." Those studies that do seek to rattle at the patriarchal paradigm have generally done so on the basis of empirical work rather than by examining the role of the feminine as a structuring ideological principle in fascism. The fact that empirical work on the role of women in fascism has come relatively late reflects an even more fundamental theoretical assumption about patriarchy as the social model for — or even cause of — fascism. Though I seek to unsettle some of those theoretical assumptions here, I am in no sense arguing that the social realities of fascism were geared toward the emancipation of women (though historians such as Claudia Koonz have shown how totalitarianism did, paradoxically, create a parallel women's public sphere even as it strove so explicitly to exclude women from political life). The intention, instead, is to listen more attentively to the ideological self presentation of proto-fascism prior to the regime's entrenchment — not simply to take it at its word, but to analyze its material.
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Machine Primitives: Philippe Lamour, Germaine Krull, and the Fascist Cult of Youth
Mark Antliff
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:
In thinking about the primitive, the sculpted athletes lining the Foro Mussolini in Rome do not usually come to mind, but that is because art historians have largely ignored the temporal and mythic dimensions shared by primitivism and fascism's cultural politics. We customarily analyze primitivism in terms of a binary contrast between "civilized" Europe and societies at a supposedly earlier stage of development: for example, the symbolist Paul Gauguin cast his move from industrialized Paris to Brittany and then Tahiti in terms of a redemptive return to a primeval condition, akin to the childhood of Western civilization. By entering into a foreign culture — whether rural Brittany or the South seas — Gauguin and others like him hoped to leave the decadent West behind and undergo a form of psycho-sexual rejuvenation through contact with so-called "primitive societies." Decadence and regeneration served to define the difference between industrial Europe and cultures viewed as still rooted in a distant past, whether it be the medievalism of agrarian Brittany or the primeval Eden of Tahiti.
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The End of Sex and the Last Man: On the Weimar Utopia of Ernst Jünger's “Worker”
Todd Presner
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:
Conceived in the early 1930s and published amidst much fanfare in late 1932, Ernst Jünger's technological fantasy of a totally mobilized society composed of metallic soldier-workers from a new world order remains one of the most vivid testimonials to the anxious visions and political turbulence of the final years of the Weimar Republic. Bringing together his reactionary political ideas with his personal experiences fighting on the German front during World War I, Der Arbeiter: Herrschaft und Gestalt [The Worker: Dominance and Form] depicts a frenetic society in a state of total and permanent mobilization. Human beings have been stripped of any individuality and transformed into new, replaceable "types" characterized by an external, instrumentalized "Gestalt." In contrast to bourgeois society and its enlightened subjectivity which placed a primacy on security, progress, and individuality, Jünger's vision adamantly rejects this society and all its values in favor of the coordinated constancy of a sociality always at war. Jünger's workers are neither the autonomous subjects of the Enlightenment, nor are they Marx's revolutionary Proletariat, nor are they the German peasantry hailed by traditional ideologues of a Blut und Boden fascism. Instead, Jünger's "worker" is the embodiment of a radically technological distillation of Nietzsche's "will to power," transported to the German front on the darkest day of the First World War — and placed there forever. It is here, in 1932, that Junger envisions a new social order.
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Driven
Jeffrey Schnapp
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:
Toad's transformation in Kenneth Graheme's 1908 fable The Wind in the Willows replays two centuries of prior Western cultural history: centuries during which modern (and particularly masculine) forms of individuality became identified with the practice of driving. "Today we live affirmatively in our automotive moments," writes the Brazilian driver-dandy João do Rio, "moments in which the driver looms as king, as sovereign, as tyrant." Toad is such a king/sovereign/tyrant, just like the 1930s drivers featured in the present essay: Filiberto in Pietro Maria Bardi's La strada e il volante ( The Roadway and the Steering Wheel), and Charles Bernard and Boris lgnatyevich K. in Ilya Ehrenburg's Desiat' loshadinkh sil ( The Life of the Automobile). Irrespective of varying ideological inflections (liberal democratic, fascist, socialist), irrespective of whether the key is mock-apocalyptic (Graheme), mock-serious (Bardi) or mock-documentary (Ehrenburg), the car becomes for all a prosthetic extension, an instrument for bigger living, because it grants access to speed. Speed is the drug that frees the driver from the anemic sensorium provided by a pedestrian existence and releases him from the constraints of morality, reason, custom, class and the law. Speed is the drug that reattaches him to the world as its conqueror, ruler and judge: the self appointed Lord of the lone trail. And speed — whether along a road way or an information superhighway — always proves addictive.
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Interview
Gender, Historiography, and the Interpretation of Fascism
Luisa Passerini
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:
Ara H. Merjian — There is a delightful irony in interviewing an individual who has made oral history — specifically the interview form — the pillar of her historical enterprise. Would you care to comment on being the subject of an interview about Italian history and culture?
Luisa Passerini — Subjectivity is always present in the historian's narrative, even when the historian uses the "objective" tone. Actually, what used to be considered objective is now understood as intersubjective — as a datum of consensus among scholars of a certain disciplinary community at a given moment — following Kuhn's theses on the history of science and Kracauer's idea of the historian as rhabdomancer, who uses her subjectivity as a tool for connecting to the past. In this perspective, history is not primarily about reconstructing the past; it is about creating new connections between the past and the present.
On the more personal, autobiographical plane of subjectivity, I always recommend students who want to go into oral history to subject themselves to the experience of being interviewed. I was interviewed on my life story and I also wrote Autobiography of a Generation, which can be understood as a long interview. It is essential to reflect on one's own relationship to memory in order to try to understand that it is a construction, and to be able to interpret others' memories in turn.
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Book Reviews
Emily Braun, Mario Sironi and Italian Modernism: Art and Politics Under Fascism
Jennifer Bethke
A review of Braun, Emily, Mario Sironi and Italian Modernism: Art and Politics Under Fascism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
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Paul Edwards, Wyndham Lewis: Painter and Writer
Josephine Park
A review of Edwards, Paul. Wyndham Lewis: Painter and Writer. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000.
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Volume 13.1 is available at Duke University Press and JSTOR. Qui Parle is edited by an independent group of graduate students at the University of California, Berkeley and published by Duke University Press.