Article contents
ADOWA AND THE HISTORIOGRAPHY OF ITALIAN COLONIALISM
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 January 2016
Extract
Report on the Convegno internazionale di studi nel centenario della battaglia di Adua, Piacenza, 10–12 April 1996, now published as, Angeld Del Boca (ed.), Adua. Le ragioni di una sconfitta, Laterza, Rome - Bari, 1997, 468 pp., ISBN 88–420–5196–9, 45,000 Lire.
In April 1987, I turned up at Trento's Centro Santa Chiara expecting to see a screening of Mustapha Akkad's The Lion of the Desert and discovered instead, due to a forced entry into the auditorium and confiscation of the reels by the Digos, that Italy faced its colonial past with real anxiety. This film recounts the life of Omar al-Mukhtar, the man who made Italy's conquest of Libya a vicious and bloody war of attrition complete with the whole set up that empirebuilding required for its cheerful accomplishment: concentration camps, mass deportations, massacres of civilians, carpet bombing of villages, etc. Omar al-Mukhtar was hanged, of course, and for Gheddafi Libyan patriotism was born, hence his pleasure in pouring enough oil money into the film to attract big names like Anthony Quinn and Irene Papas. But in Italy the film was banned because considered ‘damaging to the army's honour’. It is strange, but perhaps not altogether without logic, that the Italian army should feel threatened by people being able to see soldiers of Fascist Italy behaving as the soldiers of Fascist Italy behaved, when taking into consideration that the Italian Republic was born, like Libya, out of the Resistance. As in Germany (or so goes the story), the army remained impervious to the excesses of fascist ideology and, of course, played an important part in countering it. But if there was a project that the Italian army (before and during Fascism) made very much its own it was the colonization of Africa.
- Type
- REVIEW ARTICLES
- Information
- Copyright
- Copyright © Association for the study of Modern Italy
References
1 Labanca, N., In marcia verso Adua, Einaudi, Turin, 1993, p. xiii.Google Scholar
2 Baratieri, O., Memorie d'Africa, Genoa, 1988.Google Scholar
3 Croce, B., Storia d'Italia dal 1871 al 1915, Laterza, Rome–Bari, 1928, p. 131.Google Scholar
4 Del Boca, A., Gli Italiani in Africa Orientale. I. Dall'unità alla marcia su Roma, Laterza, Rome–Bari, 1976, p. 1. He had already published his controversial La guerra d'Abissinia 1935–41, Feltrinelli, Milan, 1965.Google Scholar
5 Del Boca, A., Gli Italiani in Libia (Tripoli bel suol d'amore 1860–1922), Laterza, Bari, 1986; Gli Italiani in Libia. Dal fascismo a Gheddafi, Laterza, Rome–Bari, 1988.Google Scholar
6 Acquarone, A., ‘Fernando Martini e l'amminstrazione della Colonia Eritre’, Clio, 1977, 4, p. 372.Google Scholar
7 The acts of the Taormina conference which included papers by Labanca, , Segré, C. and others took the ‘Ufficio centrale per i bene archivistici’ over five years to bring to the publishers. The book in question is Del Boca, A., Le guerre coloniali del fascismo, Laterza, Rome–Bari, 1991.Google Scholar
8 Rochat, G., Il colonialismo italiano. Documenti, Loescher, Turin, 1973; Naitza, G., Il colonialismo nella storia d'Italia (1882–1949) , Nuova, La Italia, Florence, 1975; Miege, J., L'imperialisme colonial italien de 1870 à nos jours, SEDES, Paris, 1968; de Jaco, A., Di mal d'Africa si muore. Cronaca inedita dell'Unità d'Italia, Editori Riuniti, Rome, 1972.Google Scholar
9 Battaglia, R., La prima guerra d'Africa, Einaudi, Turin, 1958.Google Scholar
10 Rainero, R., L'anticolonialismo italiano da Assab a Adua (1869–1896), Comunità, Milan, 1971.Google Scholar
11 Battaglia, , La prima guerra, p. 798.Google Scholar
12 For example, see Labanca, , In marcia verso Adua, pp. 19–20.Google Scholar
13 Labanca, N., ‘L'Africa italiana’, in Isnenghi, M. (ed.), I luoghi della memoria. Simboli e miti dell'Italia unita, Laterza, Rome–Bari, 1996, p. 288.Google Scholar
14 Labanca, N. (ed.), L'Africa in vetrina, Pagus, Treviso, 1992; Storia dell'Italia coloniale, Fenice 2000, Milan, 1994.Google Scholar
15 Rochat, G., ‘Adua. Analisi di una sconfitta’, in del Boca, A. (ed.), Adua. Le ragioni di una sconfitta, Laterza, Rome–Bari, 1997, p. 343.Google Scholar
16 Triulzi, A., ‘L,Africa come icona’, in Boca, Del, Adua, pp. 265, 270.Google Scholar
17 Isnenghi, M., ‘Il colonialismo di Crispi’, in Boca, Del, Adua, pp. 72, 74.Google Scholar
18 Pankhurst, R., ‘L'Esercito Etiopico’, in Boca, del, Adua, p. 313.Google Scholar
19 Del Boca, A., ‘Oreste Baratieri, una parabola coloniale’, in Boca, Del, Adua, p. 372.Google Scholar
20 Monteleone, R., ‘L'anticolonialismo socialista in Italia tra le fine dell'Ottocento e l'inizio del Novocento’, in Boca, Del, Adua, p. 82.Google Scholar
21 Canavero, A., ‘I cattolici di fronte al colonialismo’, in Boca, Del, Adua, pp. 91–114.Google Scholar
22 Labanca, N., ‘Ne esecrare ne commemorare. Il centenario di Adua in Italia’, Passato e Presente, 40, April 1997, pp. 91–103.Google Scholar
23 Isnenghi, M., ‘Il sogno africano’, in Del Boca, A. (ed.), Le guerre coloniali del Fascismo, Laterza, Rome–Bari, 1991, p. 49.Google Scholar
24 Lanaro, S., Nazione e lavoro, Marsilio, Venice, 1979; Are, G., La scoperta dell'imperialismo, Edizioni Lavoro, Rome, 1985; Gentile, E., La grande Italia, Mondadori, Milan, 1997; Banti, A., Storia della borghesia Italiana, Donzelli, Rome, 1996.Google Scholar
25 I mean the interesting but hardly exhaustive conference, ‘Due colonialismi a confronto. Italia e Germania nella loro espansione oltremare sina alla prima guerra mondiale’, held at Trento's Istituto storico italo–germanico in September 1996. The conference's proceedings, ‘Italia e Inghilterra nell'età dell'imperialismo’, edited by Seton-Watson, C. and Serra, E., are in the process of publication.Google Scholar
26 In Del Boca, A., L'Africa nella coscienza degli Italiani, Laterza, Rome–Bari, 1992, pp. 111–27.Google Scholar
- 1
- Cited by