The University of Auckland is presenting two seminars with visiting Italian professor Luciano Marrocu: Fascism on the periphery and Italian Postcolonial Literature: Ennio Flaiano’s Time to Kill. Please scroll down for more details.
School of Cultures, Languages and Linguistics
European Languages & Literatures
Research Seminar
Fascism on the periphery
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| Luciano Marrocu |
For the Italian Fascist regime,
totalitarianism was more of an aspiration than a reality, particularly because
the project of nationalization had to contend with the continuing existence—and
in some cases resistance—of different Italies, which jealously guarded their
distinctiveness. Following the March on Rome, the regime’s project of
domination had to deal with local élites, especially in the South. In only some
Northern and Central areas, where the Fascist movement was strongest, could the
regime count on social classes whose vision of a new Italy matched its own. Not
all Italians would embrace Mussolini’s project of forging a New Italian Man.
In most of
the South the regime had to deal with social classes whose histories were
vastly different from those whence Fascism emerged. These Southern classes’
version of Fascism introduced attitudes, points of view, and habits that were
perceived by the Centre, i.e. Rome, almost as acts of resistance to the
totalitarian project.
Sardinia is
a particularly useful case for examining how the Center-periphery relationship
played out. As a large island located far from the Italian peninsula, Sardinia
represents an extreme case, at least in the Italian context, of a remoteness
that is defined not only by its geography.
Monday 19 October 5-6.30 pm
Italian Postcolonial Literature: Ennio
Flaiano’s Time to Kill
Ennio Flaiano is internationally
known for his collaboration with Federico Fellini, for whom he crafted the
scripts of many movies during the fifties and sixties, including La Dolce Vita. More recently Flaiano has
attracted the attention of post-colonial scholars for his 1947 novel Tempo
di uccidere upon which Giuliano
Montaldo’s 1989 film “Time to Kill,” starring Nicholas Cage and
Giancarlo Giannini, is based. This novel recounts some of Flaiano’s real-life experiences in the
Italo-Ethiopian war, a conflict that resulted in Ethiopia’s subjection
to Italian rule. Between
November 1935 and May 1936, the 25-year-old Flaiano served as a lieutenant
while taking the first steps in his literary career by keeping a sort of diary, Aethiopia. Notes for a Pop
Song, which would be the basis for his 1947 novel. In the novel,
he portrays an anguished Italian officer who survives the Ethiopian war.
This lecture will follow
Flaiano’s itinerary as laid out in the war diary up to the actual writing of
the novel, which is recognized today as the first radical condemnation of
colonialism in Italian literature.
Wednesday 21 October 4-5:30 pm
Owen G Glen Building 260-220
Luciano Marrocu
is Professor of Modern History at the University of Cagliari. His research
fields include the history of the British Labour Party, the Fabian Society, and
the life and writings of George Orwell. Notable publications on these topics
include Il modello laburista (The
Labourist Model, 1985); Il salotto della signora Webb (Mrs. Webb’s
Sitting Room,1992); and Orwell: la solitudine di uno scrittore (Orwell: a Writer’s Loneliness, 2009). He
has also written a seminal essay on fascism in Sardinia in the canonical History
of Italy 1998.
Luciano
is also a renowned fiction writer. To date he has published seven novels, most
of which are set during the fascist regime. These constitute an alternative
means of exploring the fascist epoch as a complement to his academic research
in this field.
