When the League of Nations lost ground in the 1930s, the ICI joined forces with fascist colonial movements to build up a fascist and corporatist “Eurafrica.” Chapter 7 shows how ICI members co-organized the international Volta Congress on Africa, held in Rome in 1938. The predominantly fascist Volta Congress wanted to replace the League of Nations as the torchbearer of colonial internationalism. To do so, colonial internationalists synthesized liberal and fascist colonial ideas into a revived Roman Empire, which they called Eurafrica. The eclectic character of this fascist Eurafrica came to the fore, when they incorporated Malinowski’s progressive anthropology and Islamic “tribal” and warrior traditions alike to govern the fascist Eurafrican empire. In a typically fascist manner, they did not want democratic representation in the colony and favored a corporatist representation through the different branches of the economy. This attempt to establish a corporatist “Eurafrican” empire coincided with ICI members from France reviving Islamic corporatism in Africa to use as a governmental tool.

The culminating chapter, “Mussolini the Impresario, II: Fascism and the Theatre for Masses,” provides a panoramic look at the numerous regime-sponsored theatrical endeavors developed mainly in the 1930s. Breaking with the tendency to read these as a rupture with the more liberal, vanguard proposals of the 1920s, the author draws several lines of continuity between fascism’s two decades and across a variety of performance-related initiatives – including the Carri di Tespi mobile theatres, the Theatrical Saturday for urban laborers, the Fascist University Groups’ Experimental Playhouse Network, the National Institute for Ancient Drama, and the foundation of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts – and considers them as single elements of a comprehensive plan that sought to meet the dictator’s explicit call for a production system that would simultaneously provide access, pedagogy, and innovation. The chapter offers a new concept for understanding the regime’s theatrical politics: neither the so-called aestheticization of politics nor the politicization of aesthetics, Mussolini's method was that of a strategic aestheticism, which would nevertheless satisfy the needs of art and of politics at one and the same time.