Description
Book SynopsisIn her examination of the culture of Italian fascism, Mabel Berezin focuses on how Mussolini''s regime consciously constructed a nonliberal public sphere to support its political aims. Fascism stresses form over content, she believes, and the regime tried to build its political support through the careful construction and manipulation of public spectacles or rituals such as parades, commemoration ceremonies, and holiday festivities. The fascists believed they could rely on the motivating power of spectacle, and experiential symbols.
In contrast with the liberal democratic notion of separable public and private selves, Italian fascism attempted to merge the public and private selves in political spectacles, creating communities of feeling in public piazzas. Such communities were only temporary, Berezin explains, and fascist identity was only formed to the extent that it could be articulated in a language of pre-existing cultural identities. In the Italian case, those identities
Trade Review
An excellent interdisciplinary work. Progressing from a commemorative period that made the 1922 March on Rome the centerpiece of rituals to a mobilization phase after 1934, which emphasized athletic and military bodies, Berezin delineates the phases in which rituals of the piazza passed from emphasizing the myth of national revolution to that creating the myths of the new Roman empire.... Berezin's work is a splendid addition to literature on fascist politicization of culture and civic life.
* Choice *
This excellent book explores how politics, culture, and identity intersected in interwar Italy so as to make the 'fascist project': a creation of the self and of new identities as citizens of fascist Italy.... This is a rich and rewarding book; the writing is engaging and the theory challenging. It is an important contribution to our understanding of fascism and of the making of modern identities.
* Virginia Quarterly *
Instantly accessible.... An admirable monograph based on a wide range of readings intelligently deployed. Historians will appreciate the factual content and will find the sociological insights stimulating.
* American Historical Review *
