Pre-Fascist Italian imperialistic discourse How Italian literature shaped eastern Adriatic in the years before the 1st World War

Dalmazzo, Pietro

Abstract

Although Italian colonialism was born late and died early, the Italian colonial ambitions emerged promptly after the process of unification. The eastern Adriatic constituted one of the areas subjected to the Italian expansionistic policies. Those policies, which evolved in the first decade of the 20th century through diplomacy and attempts to develop political and cultural influence, accompanied a literary production about this region constituted by journalistic reportages, and geographical and ethnographical accounts of travel and explorations. This literature, mainly published in the years before the 1st World War, covered a role in legitimizing and giving literary consistency to the Italia expansionistic discourse towards eastern Adriatic. The paper aims to analyse the Italian literature about the eastern Adriatic, produced during the liberal period, to understand the presence of a colonial attitude within the authors, and to look at how this attitude was legitimated and deployed through their texts. Secondly, it focuses on the comprehensive narration developed about the eastern Adriatic, which constituted the basis of the subsequent colonial representation of these territories during the Fascist period. The paper will investigate these issues evaluating how this region was perceived and discursively constructed in colonial terms, focusing on which narrative and descriptive patterns were involved in the literary representation of eastern Adriatic social and territorial spaces. The paper seeks to develop this analysis through a focus on the works of two authors: Vico Mantegazza, a Journalist who worked as a reporter from the Balkans and the African colonies, and Antonio Baldacci, a geographer, botanist and ethnographer who focused mainly on the Balkan region.

Citation

Dalmazzo, P. (2020, November). Pre-Fascist Italian imperialistic discourse How Italian literature shaped eastern Adriatic in the years before the 1st World War. Paper presented at ASMI POSTGRADUATE SYMPOSIUM 2020

• Presentation Conference Type: Conference Paper (unpublished)
• Conference Name: ASMI POSTGRADUATE SYMPOSIUM 2020
• Start Date: Nov 25, 2020
• End Date: Nov 26, 2020
• Deposit Date: Jan 30, 2024
• Public URL: https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1758313