Academic literature on the topic 'Italy – Anniversaries – History'

The centenary of the March on Rome has prompted Modern Italy's Contexts and Debates section to focus on the public uses of history in reference to interwar Fascism. We are looking into the ‘Past, Present, and Future of the Italian Memory of Fascism’, to borrow the title of Guido Bartolini's interviews that were published in our issue 27 (4), 2022. While commemorations and anniversaries shouldn't inherently influence academic research agendas, a broader understanding of public memory can help us to understand the current political mood in Italy. For example, it can explain why the centennial and other comparable ‘fascist’ anniversaries now have little meaning for most of the Italian public and are scarcely addressed by politicians. Indeed, most Italians seems to suffer from political amnesia. The condition is so serious that not even a dramatic occurrence such as the victory of the proudly post-fascist Fratelli d'Italia party at the election of September 2022 has proved able to cure it. Happening just a few days before the centenary of the March on Rome, the electoral results were surely expected to elicit a strong reaction by left-wing politicians and intellectuals – perhaps a mass demonstration, like the one that took place in Milan on 25 April 1994, in the aftermath of the first victory of Silvio Berlusconi's right-wing coalition, when another post-fascist party, Alleanza Nazionale, took power. Yet nothing of that sort has happened in 2022. Why?

Abstract In 1961, Italy celebrated the hundredth anniversary of its unification. A wide range of initiatives commemorated the centennial, highlighting the glorious deeds of the Risorgimento and their long-term, positive legacy. Seven years later, Japan embarked on a similar task with the celebration of the hundredth anniversary of the Meiji Restoration (1868). Like the Italian National Jubilee, the Japanese one praised the country’s achievements, presenting Meiji Restoration as a successful transformation unmatched in world history. Although there is literature about the Italian and Japanese centennials, there has been no attempt to comparatively analyse them. Yet, the two jubilees reveal interesting similarities that deserve further attention. In both cases, the official commemorative agenda proposed a self-congratulatory narrative linking the ideal starting point of modernization – Risorgimento/Meiji Restoration – to the arrival point, namely the economic “miracles” that the two countries were experiencing. Both in Italy and in Japan, the anniversaries posed crucial questions concerning the historical assessment of the totalitarian regimes. Finally, in both cases the celebrations were the subject of intense domestic debates. Through an investigation of carefully selected first-hand sources in Italian and Japanese, the paper will make a comparative analysis of the Italian National Jubilee and the Meiji Centennial in order to gain theoretical insights on the way the parties in power used history to build national identity.

Some marginal reflections on a controversial anniversary. The 150th anniversary of the unification of Italy proved to be an interesting observatory to evaluate the contrasting ways through which the various components of society looked at the foundation moment of the State. The anniversary was quite different from those of 1911 and 1961 in that the current plight of the country was deeply reflected in meanings and implications. Initially prepared in the midst of many uncertainties, because of the modest involvement of official institutions and government circles, the 150th anniversary has turned out to be highly successful, thanks to the role of President of the Republic and to an intense involvement of the regional civic networks. The article focuses on this important step, in particular focussing attention on the relationship between critical analysis of national history and social demand to re-establish the historical foundation of a shared civic and social coexistence.

Known for her fantastical and allegorical style and for her affiliation with "magic realism," Paola Masino's reputation rests chiefly on her novels, particularly Nascita e morte della massaia, and on works that are seemingly confined to female subjectivity and the private sphere. This article examines Masino's short fiction to reveal a more public, engagé, side of the author. After a close reading of "Fame," "Famiglia," "Lino," "Terzo anniversario" and "Paura," it focuses on the two racconti brevi "Una parola che vola" and "Il nobile gallo" in order to highlight the neo-realist aspect of the pieces and to argue that Masino drew on allegories, fables, and parables to engage with history. It also maintains that Masino used her pen as a political tool to denounce the horror and suffering of war, to foster a commitment to the Resistance, and to call for the cultural and political reconstruction of Italy.

Published in June 2021 by La Route de la Soie – Éditions, ‘Une géopolitique de la Slovénie’ (A Geopolitics of Slovenia) by Laurent Hassid PhD is a monograph in French on the geopolitics of Slovenia. The author is an associated researcher at the Université Sorbonne Paris Nord in France, specializing in geography and borders. The foreword by Barthélémy Courmont PhD, Assistant Professor at the Catholic University in Lille, France, introduces the book as an opportunity for the reader to expand their knowledge about Slovenia by obtaining an insight into its geography, history and identity. Indeed, the 223-page monograph is structured in three parts following the destiny of Slovenia from a community of a language to an independent nation (1: Unity of a nation; 2: Diversity of a nation; and 3: From unity during independence to the division of an European state). From introduction to conclusion the author looks at the geographical, historical, and political factors that led to the emergence of Slovenia as a sovereign state, which can at the same time be seen as belonging to Central Europe, the Balkans, and the Mediterranean region. The conclusion points only briefly to some challenges which could put into question the European commitments of the country and its ability to face the current and upcoming effects of globalization. The storyline develops gradually from parts one to three, which are broken down into two to three chapters each. The multiple headings within the chapters, and the various maps, pictures and tables which underpin the argumentation, render the book reader-friendly. The article “une” (in English “a”) in the book’s title seems to suggest that this monograph touches upon one of several possible ways of looking at the geopolitics of Slovenia. In particular, the introduction outlines the geographical features of the Slovene territory and refers to several historic facts which explain the state building process of a nation with its own language and territory, but without any particular statehood history. The first part portrays the emergence and evolution of the Slovene nation. This is closely associated with the Slovene literature of the 16th century and onwards, which laid the foundations of a national awakening. The author refers to the history of Carantania and the Counts (Dukes) of Celje as myths that played a significant part in the nation and state-building process of the 19th and 20th centuries. The second part of the book focuses on the differences and challenges within the young country. It describes the historical regions and their dialects, and touches upon the composition of minorities, the Slovene diaspora, and the various ex-Yugoslav nationalities living in Slovenia and their relationships with the native Slovenes. The third part talks about the political developments of the late 1980s and of the post-independence period. The author describes the late 1980s up to 1992 as a time of national unity, which was followed by 20 years of political stability (from 1992 to 2011). Since 2011, he considers that Slovenia has been confronted by an emerging political instability. He offers a snapshot of the contemporary political system, and the main political personalities and events. The book ends with a short reflection of the potential challenges ahead for Slovenia. The book is a welcome addition to monographs written in French. The scarce literature dedicated to Slovenia and its geopolitics is most likely due to the fact that Slovene territory had not been independent historically before 1991. If ever mentioned, it was within the Austrian, Italian, or Yugoslav (Balkan) geopolitical context. In his preface to the book, Barthélémy Courmont indicates this when mentioning that he crossed Slovenia a few times in the early 1990s without even realizing it. This observation is very similar to the one made by Robert Kaplan in his geopolitical bestseller, Balkan Ghosts , where he explains how he crossed the Yugoslav-Austrian border and came to Zagreb (Croatia) in the late 1980s, without noticing any territory or (geo)political entity in between. Timewise, its publication coincides with the anniversaries of two key geopolitical moments in Slovene history. June 2021 marks 30 years since Slovenia became a sovereign and independent state and a full member of the international community. It is also the anniversary of the “Vidovdan” constitution of June 1921 which consecrated the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes; it put an end to the very first independent appearance of Slovenes on the geopolitical chessboard, which had begun in October 1918. This monograph assembles an important amount of geographic, linguistic, cultural and (mostly contemporary) political data and events, which together help to understand the geo(political) landscape of Slovenia. These also explain, in the view of the author of the monograph, the birth of the Slovene nation and its development into an independent country. As more than a quarter of the book is focused on contemporary Slovene politics and related actual (geo)political events , the reader can get a sound insight of the first three decades since Slovenia’s independence. What the book does not provide to the reader, and in particular to the French-speaking audience, is a geostrategic analysis. The author refers briefly to the Napoleonian Illyrian provinces and the Illyrian movement, but he falls short of offering any assessment of the strategic impact of France or other main powers with regard to this territory. One might have expected a closer look at France’s strategic reasons for establishing the Illyrian provinces (1809-13), and at its role in the formation of the Versailles Yugoslavia in 1918-19. The involvement of France in the drawing of the Slovene borders with Austria and Italy , and its current and future strategic stance with regard to Slovenia and the region it belongs to, would have also deserved further consideration. All in all, Une géopolitique de la Slovénie has the merit of offering to the reader, especially to the francophone one, an insight into the geography, identity, and history of Slovenia. It could be a reference for future writing on this young country. It offers a starting point to those who wish to learn more about Slovenia, be it for professional or personal reasons. To Slovene academia, the book provides an insight into how the overall Slovene geopolitical context is perceived through the lens of a foreign (French) author, and it may generate an interest in future writing on this topic accessible to foreign readers.

The tripartite pact, concluded by Germany, Italy, and Japan in 1940, sought to create a new global order. This article is part of a broader shift in scholarship, inspired by global and cultural history. Instead of revisiting the decision-making that led to the pact's conclusion, this article explores the pact through the dialectics of culture and power. Through an archive-based interpretation of the pact's signing and the celebrations of its anniversaries from 1941 until 1945 that involved ordinary people in Axis-dominated territories around the world, the central mechanisms of this global fascist alliance become clear. A performative diplomacy of power and unity held the alliance together. Style and substance were not mutually exclusive categories of tripartite politics; instead, ‘real’ and representational politics shaped each other. The pact was a concerted attempt by the three signatories to transform global political structures and supersede the purported global hegemony of the liberal democracies.

“Error: no such entry.” “The thread specified does not exist.” These messages appeared every now and then in my cyberethnography – a study of Russian-Israeli queer immigrants and their online social spaces. Anthropological research in cyberspace invites us to rethink the notion of “the field” and the very practice of ethnographic observation. In negotiating my own position as an anthropologist of online sociality, I was particularly inspired by Radhika Gajjala’s notion of “cyberethnography” as an epistemological and methodological practice of examining the relations between self and other, voice and voicelessness, belonging, exclusion, and silencing as they are mediated through information-communication technologies (“Interrupted” 183). The main cyberethnographic site of my research was the queer immigrants’ Website with its news, essays, and photo galleries, as well as the vibrant discussions that took place on the Website’s bulletin board. “The Forum,” as it was known among the participants, was visited daily by dozens, among them newbies, passers-by, and regulars. My study, dedicated to questions of home-making, violence, and belonging, was following the publications that appeared on the Website, as well as the daily discussions on the Forum. Both the publications and the discussions were archived since the Website’s creation in 2001 and throughout my fieldwork that took place in 2003-04. My participant observations of the discussions “in real time” were complemented by archival research, where one would expect to discover an anthropologist’s wildest dreams: the fully-documented everyday life of a community, a word-by-word account of what was said, when, and to whom. Or so I hoped. The “error” messages that appeared when I clicked on some of the links in the archive, or the absence of a thread I knew was there before, raised the question of erasure and deletion, of empty spaces that marked that which used to be, but which had ceased to exist. The “error” messages, in other words, disrupted my cyberethnography through what can be best described as haunting. “Haunting,” writes Avery Gordon in her Ghostly Matters, “describes how that which appears to be not there is often a seething presence, acting on and often meddling with taken-for-granted realities” (8). This essay looks into the seething presence of erasures in online archives. What is the role, I will ask, of online archives in the life of a cybercommunity? How and when are the archives preserved, and by whom? What are the relations between archives, erasure, and home-making in cyberspace? *** Many online communities based on mailing lists, newsgroups, or bulletin boards keep archives of their discussions – archives that at times go on for years. Sometimes they are accessible only to members of lists or communities that created them; other times they are open to all. Archived discussions can act as a form of collective history and as marks of belonging (or exclusion). As the records of everyday conversations remain on the Web, they provide a unique glance into the life of an online collective for a visitor or a newcomer. For those who participated in the discussions browsing through archives can bring nostalgic feelings: memories – pleasurable and/or painful – of times shared with others; memories of themselves in the past. Turning to archived discussions was not an infrequent act in the cybercommunity I studied. While there is no way to establish how many participants looked into how many archives, and how often they did so, there is a clear indicator that the archives were visited and reflected on. For one, old threads were sometimes “revived”: technically, a discussion thread is never closed unless the administrator decides to “freeze” it. If the thread is not “frozen,” anyone can go to an old discussion and post there; a new posting would automatically move an archived thread to the list of “recent”/“currently active” ones. As all the postings have times and dates, the reappearance of threads from months ago among the “recent discussions” indicates the use of archives. In addition to such “revivals,” every now and then someone would open a new discussion thread, posting a link to an old discussion and expressing thoughts about it. Sometimes it was a reflection on the Forum itself, or on the changes that took place there; many veteran participants wrote about the archived discussion in a sentimental fashion, remembering “the old days.” Other times it was a reflection on a participant’s life trajectory: looking at one’s old postings, a person would reflect on how s/he changed and sometimes on how the Website and its bulletin board changed his/her life. Looking at old discussions can be seen as performances of belonging: the repetitive reference to the archives constitutes the Forum as home with a multilayered past one can dwell on. Turning to the archives emphasises the importance of preservation, of keeping cyberwords as an object of collective possession and affective attachment. It links the individual and the collective: looking at old threads one can reflect on “how I used to be” and “how the Forum used to be.” Visiting the archives, then, constitutes the Website as simultaneously a site where belonging is performed, and an object of possession that can belong to a collective (Fortier). But the archives preserved on the Forum were never a complete documentation of the discussions. Many postings were edited immediately after appearance or later. In the first two and a half years of the Website’s existence any registered participant, as long as his/her nickname was not banned from the Forum, could browse through his/her messages and edit them. One day in 2003 one person decided to “commit virtual suicide” (as he and others called it). He went through all the postings and, since there was no option for deleting them all at once, he manually erased them one by one. Many participants were shocked to discover his acts, mourning him as well as the archives he damaged. The threads in which he had once taken part still carried signs of his presence: when participants edit their postings, all they can do is delete the text, leaving an empty space in the thread’s framework (only the administrator can modify the framework of a thread and delete text boxes). But the text box with name and date of each posting is still there. “The old discussions don’t make sense now,” a forum participant lamented, “because parts of the arguments are missing.” Following this “suicide” the Website’s administrator decided that from that point on participants could only edit their last posting but could not make any retrospective changes to the archives. Both the participants’ mourning of the mutilated threads and administrator’s decision suggest that there is a desire to preserve the archives as collective possession belonging to all and not to be tampered with by individuals. But the many conflicts between the administrator and some participants on what could be posted and what should be censored reveal that another form of ownership/ possession was at stake. “The Website is private property and I can do anything I like,” the administrator often wrote in response to those who questioned his erasure of other people’s postings, or his own rude and aggressive behaviour towards participants. Thus he broke the very rules of netiquette he had established – the Website’s terms of use prohibit personal attacks and aggressive language. Possession-as-belonging here was figured as simultaneously subjected to a collective “code of practice” and as arbitrary, dependant on one person’s changes of mind. Those who were particularly active in challenging the administrator (for example, by stating that although the Website is indeed privately owned, the interactions on the Forum belong to all; or by pointing out to the administrator that he was contradicting his own rules) were banned from the site or threatened with exclusion, and the threads where the banning was announced were sometimes deleted. Following the Forum’s rules, the administrator was censoring messages of an offensive nature, for example, commercial advertisements or links to pornographic Websites, as well as some personal attacks between participants. But among the threads doomed for erasure were also postings of a political nature, in particular those expressing radical left-wing views and opposing the tone of political loyalty dominating the site (while attacks on those participants who expressed the radical views were tolerated and even encouraged by the administrator). *** The archives that remain on the site, then, are not a full documentation of everyday narratives and conversations but the result of selection and regulation of both individual participants and – predominantly – the administrator. These archives are caught between several contradictory approaches to the Forum. One is embedded within the capitalist notion of payment as conferring ownership: I paid for the domain, says the administrator, therefore I own everything that takes place there. Another, manifested in the possibility of editing one’s postings, views cyberspeech as belonging first and foremost to the speaker who can modify and erase them as s/he pleases. The third defines the discussions that take place on the Forum as collective property that cannot be ruled by a single individual, precisely because it is the result of collective interaction. But while the second and the third approaches are shared by most participants, it is the idea of private ownership that seemed to dominate and facilitate most of the erasures. Erasure and modification performed by the administrator were not limited to censorship of particular topics, postings, or threads. The archive of the Forum as a whole was occasionally “cleared.” According to the administrator, the limited space on the site required “clearance” of the oldest threads to make room for new ones. Decisions about such clearances were not shared with anyone, nor were the participants notified about it in advance. One day parts of the archive simply disappeared, as I discovered during my fieldwork. When I began daily observations on the Website in December 2003, I looked at the archives page and saw that the General Forum section of the Forum went back for about a year and a half, and the Lesbian Forum section for about a year. I then decided to follow the discussions as they emerged and unfolded for 5-6 months, saving only the most interesting threads in my field diary, and to download all the archived threads later, for future detailed analysis. But to my great surprise, in May 2004 I discovered that while the General Forum still dated back to September 2002, the oldest thread on the Lesbian Forum was dated December 2003! All earlier threads were removed without any notice to Forum participants; and, as I learned later, no record of the threads was kept on- or offline. These examples of erasure and “clearance” demonstrate the complexity of ownership on the site: a mixture of legal and capitalist power intertwined with social hierarchies that determine which discussions and whose words are (more) valuable (The administrator has noted repeatedly that the discussions on the Lesbian Forum are “just chatter.” Ironically, both the differences in style between the General Forum and the Lesbian Forum and the administrator’s account of them resemble the (stereo)typical heterosexual gendering of talk). And while the effects and the results of erasure are compound, they undoubtly point to the complexity – and fragility! – of “home” in cyberspace and to the constant presence of violence in its constitution. During my fieldwork I felt the strange disparity between the narratives of the Website as a homey space (expressed both in the site’s official description and in some participants’ account of their experiences), and the frequent acts of erasure – not only of particular participants but more broadly of large parts of its archives. All too often, the neat picture of the “community archive” where one can nostalgically dwell on the collective past was disrupted by the “error” message. Error: no such entry. The thread specified does not exist. It was not only the incompleteness of archives that indicated fights and erasures. As I gradually learned throughout my fieldwork, the history of the Website itself was based on internal conflicts, omitted contributions, and constantly modified stories of origins. For example, the story of the Website’s establishment, as it was published in the About Us section of the site and reprinted in celebratory texts of the first anniversaries, presents the site as created by “three fathers.” The three were F, the administrator, M. who wrote, edited, and translated most of the material, and the third person whose name was never mentioned. When I asked about him on the site and later in interviews with both M. and F., they repeatedly and steadily ignored the question, and changed the subject of conversation. But the third “father” was not the only one whose name was omitted. In fact, the original Website was created by three women and another man. M. and F. joined later, and soon afterwards F., who had acted as the administrator during my fieldwork, took over the material and moved the site to another domain. Not only were the original creators erased from the site’s history; they were gradually ostracised from the new Website. When I interviewed two of the women, I mentioned the narrative of the site as a “child of three fathers.” “More like an adopted child,” chuckled one of them with bitterness, and told me the story of the original Website. Moved by their memories, the two took me to the computer. They went to the Internet Archive’s “WayBack Machine” Website – a mega-archive of sorts, an online server that keeps traces of old Web pages. One of the women managed to recover several pages of the old Website; sad and nostalgic, she shared with me the few precious traces of what was once her and her friends’ creation. But those, too, were haunted pages – most of the hyperlinks there generated “error” messages instead of actual articles or discussion threads. Error: no such entry. The thread specified does not exist. After a few years of working closely together on their “child,” M. and F. drifted apart, too. The hostility between the two intensified. Old materials (mostly written, translated, or edited by M. over a 3 year period) were moved into an archive by F. the administrator. They were made accessible through a small link hidden at the bottom of the homepage. One day they disappeared completely. Shortly afterwards, in September 2006, the Website celebrated its fifth anniversary. For this occasion the administrator wrote “the history of the Website,” where he presented it as his enterprise, noting in passing two other contributors whose involvement was short and marginal. Their names were not mentioned, but the two were described in a defaming and scornful way. *** So where do the “error” messages take us? What do they tell us about homes and communities in cyberspace? In her elaboration on cybercommunities, Radhika Gajjala notes that: Cyberspace provides a very apt site for the production of shifting yet fetishised frozen homes (shifting as more and more people get online and participate, frozen as their narratives remain on Websites and list archives through time in a timeless floating fashion) (“Interrupted”, 178). Gajjala’s notion of shifting yet fetishised and frozen homes is a useful term for capturing the nature of communication on the Forum throughout the 5 years of its existence. It was indeed a shifting home: many people came and participated, leaving parts of themselves in the archives; others were expelled and banned, leaving empty spaces and traces of erasure in the form of “error” messages. The presence of those erased or “cleared” was no longer registered in words – an ultimate sign of existence in the text-based online communication. And yet, they were there as ghosts, living through the traces left behind and the “seething presence” of haunting (Gordon 8). The Forum was a fetishised home, too, as the negotiation of ownership and the use of old threads demonstrate. However, Gajjala’s vision of archives suggests their wholeness, as if every word and every discussion is “frozen” in its entirety. The idea of fetishised homes does gesture to the complex and complicated reading of the archives; but what is left unproblematic are the archives themselves. Being attentive to the troubled, incomplete, and haunted archives invites a more careful and critical reading of cyberhomes – as Gajjala herself demonstrates in her discussion of online silences – and of the interrelation of violence and belonging in it (CyberSelves 2, 5). Constituted in cyberspace, the archives are embedded in the particular nature of online sociality, with its fantasy of timeless and floating traces, as well as with its brutality of deletion. Cyberwords do remain on archives and servers, sometimes for years; they can become ghosts of people who died or of collectives that no longer exist. But these ghosts, in turn, are haunted by the words and Webpages that never made it into the archives – words that were said but then deleted. And of course, cyberwords as fetishised and frozen homes are also haunted by what was never said in the first place, by silences that are as constitutive of homes as the words. References Fortier, Anne-Marie. “Community, Belonging and Intimate Ethnicity.” Modern Italy 1.1 (2006): 63-77. Gajjala, Radhika. “An Interrupted Postcolonial/Feminist Cyberethnography: Complicity and Resistance in the ‘Cyberfield’.” Feminist Media Studies 2.2 (2002): 177-193. Gajjala, Radhika. Cyber Selves: Feminist Ethnographies of South-Asian Women. Oxford: Alta Mira Press, 2004. Gordon, Avery. Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination. Minneapolis and London: U of Minneapolis P, 1997. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Kuntsman, Adi. "“Error: No Such Entry”: Haunted Ethnographies of Online Archives." M/C Journal 10.5 (2007). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0711/05-kuntsman.php>. APA Style Kuntsman, A. (Oct. 2007) "“Error: No Such Entry”: Haunted Ethnographies of Online Archives," M/C Journal, 10(5). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0711/05-kuntsman.php>.

Defence date: 14 April 2003
Examining board: Cathérine Brice, IEP, Paris ; Giovanni Federico, EUI ; Ilaria Porciani, Università di Bologna ; Raffaele Romanelli, EUI (supervisore)
PDF of thesis uploaded from the Library digitised archive of EUI PhD theses completed between 2013 and 2017