Late Nineteenth-Century Italy in Africa

Late Nineteenth-Century Italy in Africa PDF Author: Stephen C. Bruner
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443878553
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 197

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Book Description
“Civilizing Africa” – bringing European institutions and society to Africa – was a common rationale for nineteenth-century European expansions into that continent. However, in March 1891 a news correspondent accused officials in Italy’s Red Sea colony of having ordered, without trial, the secret and brutal killing of certain indigenous notables. A scandal erupted because the news contradicted civilizing expectations, portraying Italians rather than Africans as the barbarians. The press drove a public debate over the accusations, but the debate ultimately led to an unanticipated reversal: public acceptance of the killings, because most Italians no longer considered European standards applicable to Africans. Reportage on three topics turned out to be most influential in shifting the public outlook: an Italo-Abyssinian diplomatic impasse, an on-going Africa famine, and the public persona of a colonial commander. Historians have read the 1891 affair as an inconsequential, essentially minor event in the run-up to the 1896 battle of Adua (Adwa), Italy’s defeat by African forces that some have called an event of world-historical consequence. Yet the Livraghi affair re-shaped the Italian outlook on colonialism, opening the door to the later Italo-Abyssinian conflict and an event like Adua. The affair was so important to contemporary Italians that it occupied public attention for ten months, and influenced attitudes and colonial policy for decades. It prompted an enduring change without which there might have been no Adua.

Late Nineteenth-Century Italy in Africa

Late Nineteenth-Century Italy in Africa PDF Author: Stephen C. Bruner
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443878553
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 197

Get Book

Book Description
“Civilizing Africa” – bringing European institutions and society to Africa – was a common rationale for nineteenth-century European expansions into that continent. However, in March 1891 a news correspondent accused officials in Italy’s Red Sea colony of having ordered, without trial, the secret and brutal killing of certain indigenous notables. A scandal erupted because the news contradicted civilizing expectations, portraying Italians rather than Africans as the barbarians. The press drove a public debate over the accusations, but the debate ultimately led to an unanticipated reversal: public acceptance of the killings, because most Italians no longer considered European standards applicable to Africans. Reportage on three topics turned out to be most influential in shifting the public outlook: an Italo-Abyssinian diplomatic impasse, an on-going Africa famine, and the public persona of a colonial commander. Historians have read the 1891 affair as an inconsequential, essentially minor event in the run-up to the 1896 battle of Adua (Adwa), Italy’s defeat by African forces that some have called an event of world-historical consequence. Yet the Livraghi affair re-shaped the Italian outlook on colonialism, opening the door to the later Italo-Abyssinian conflict and an event like Adua. The affair was so important to contemporary Italians that it occupied public attention for ten months, and influenced attitudes and colonial policy for decades. It prompted an enduring change without which there might have been no Adua.

Revisioning Italy

Revisioning Italy PDF Author: Beverly Allen
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 9780816627271
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 356

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Book Description
More than any other nation, Italy -- from its imperial past to its subordinate present, from its colonial forays to its splendid isolation -- embodies the myriad and contradictory historical forms of nationhood. This volume covers a range of subjects drawn from Italy and abroad to study Italian national identity. Whether considering opera or Ninja Turtles, the essays reveal how cultural identity is constructed and manipulated -- an issue made urgent by the influx of African, Indochinese, and Eastern European immigrants into Italy today. Topics include exile, nationalism, and imagined communities, Italy's colonial "unconscious", and Mussolini's adventures in North Africa.

Images of Colonialism and Decolonisation in the Italian Media

Images of Colonialism and Decolonisation in the Italian Media PDF Author: Paolo Bertella Farnetti
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 152750414X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
The twentieth century saw a proliferation of media discourses on colonialism and, later, decolonisation. Newspapers, periodicals, films, radio and TV broadcasts contributed to the construction of the image of the African “Other” across the colonial world. In recent years, a growing body of literature has explored the role of these media in many colonial societies. As regards the Italian context, however, although several works have been published about the links between colonial culture and national identity, none have addressed the specific role of the media and their impact on collective memory (or lack thereof). This book fills that gap, providing a review of images and themes that have surfaced and resurfaced over time. The volume is divided into two sections, each organised around an underlying theme: while the first deals with visual memory and images from the cinema, radio, television and new media, the second addresses the role of the printed press, graphic novels and comics, photography and trading cards.

Roman Holidays

Roman Holidays PDF Author: Robert K. Martin
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
ISBN: 1587294044
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 265

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Book Description
Featuring essays by twelve prominent American literature scholars, Roman Holidaysexplores the tradition of American travel to Italy and makes a significant contribution to the understanding of nineteenth-century American encounters with Italian culture and, more specifically, with Rome. The increase in American travel to Italy during the nineteenth century was partly a product of improved conditions of travel. As suggested in the title, Italy served nineteenth-century writers and artists as a kind of laboratory site for encountering Others and “other” kinds of experience. No doubt Italy offered a place of holiday—a momentary escape from the familiar—but the journey to Rome, a place urging upon the visitor a new and more complex sense of history, also forced a reexamination of oneself and one's identity. Writers and artists found their religious, political, and sexual assumptions challenged. Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Marble Faun has a prominent place in this collection: as Henry James commented in his study of Hawthorne, the book was “part of the intellectual equipment of the Anglo-Saxon visitor to Rome.” The essayists also examine works by James, Fuller, Melville, Douglass, Howells, and other writers as well as such sculptors as Hiram Powers, William Wetmore Story, and Harriet Hosmer. Bringing contemporary concerns about gender, race, and class to bear upon nineteenth-century texts, Roman Holidays is an especially timely contribution to nineteenth-century American studies.

Opera and Modern Spectatorship in Late Nineteenth-Century Italy

Opera and Modern Spectatorship in Late Nineteenth-Century Italy PDF Author: Alessandra Campana
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316194868
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 223

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Book Description
At the turn of the twentieth century Italian opera participated to the making of a modern spectator. The Ricordi stage manuals testify to the need to harness the effects of operatic performance, activating opera's capacity to cultivate a public. This book considers how four operas and one film deal with their public: one that in Boito's Mefistofele is entertained by special effects, or that in Verdi's Simon Boccanegra is called upon as a political body to confront the specters of history. Also a public that in Verdi's Otello is subjected to the manipulation of contemporary acting, or one that in Puccini's Manon Lescaut is urged to question the mechanism of spectatorship. Lastly, the silent film Rapsodia satanica, thanks to the craft and prestige of Pietro Mascagni's score, attempts to transform the new industrial medium into art, addressing its public's search for a bourgeois pan-European cultural identity, right at the outset of the First World War.

Black Africans in Renaissance Europe

Black Africans in Renaissance Europe PDF Author: Thomas Foster Earle
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521815826
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 448

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Book Description
This highly original book opens up the almost entirely neglected area of the black African presence in Western Europe during the Renaissance. Covering history, literature, art history and anthropology, it investigates a whole range of black African experience and representation across Renaissance Europe, from various types of slavery to black musicians and dancers, from real and symbolic Africans at court to the views of the Catholic Church, and from writers of African descent to Black African criminality. Their findings demonstrate the variety and complexity of black African life in fifteenth and sixteenth-century Europe, and how it was affected by firmly held preconceptions relating to the African continent and its inhabitants, reinforced by Renaissance ideas and conditions. Of enormous importance both for European and American history, this book mixes empirical material and theoretical approaches, and addresses such issues as stereotypes, changing black African identity, and cultural representation in art and literature.

The First World War from Tripoli to Addis Ababa (1911-1924)

The First World War from Tripoli to Addis Ababa (1911-1924) PDF Author: Silvia Bruzzi
Publisher: Centre français des études éthiopiennes
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
For a long time now it has been common understanding that Africa played only a marginal role in the First World War. Its reduced theatre of operations appeared irrelevant to the strategic balance of the major powers. This volume is a contribution to the growing body of historical literature that explores the global and social history of the First World War. It questions the supposedly marginal role of Africa during the Great War with a special focus on Northeast Africa. In fact, between 1911 and 1924 a series of influential political and social upheavals took place in the vast expanse between Tripoli and Addis Ababa. The First World War was to profoundly change the local balance of power. This volume consists of fifteen chapters divided into three sections. The essays examine the social, political and operational course of the war and assess its consequences in a region straddling Africa and the Middle East. The relationship between local events and global processes is explored, together with the regional protagonists and their agency. Contrary to the myth still prevailing, the First World War did have both immediate and long-term effects on the region. This book highlights some of the significant aspects associated with it.

Italians in Africa and the Japanese in South East Asia

Italians in Africa and the Japanese in South East Asia PDF Author: Nikolaos Mavropoulos
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110757842
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 436

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Book Description
The comparison of early Italy’s and Japan’s colonialism is without precedence. The majority of studies on Italian and Japanese expansion refer to the 1930–1940s period (fascist/totalitarian era) when Japan annexed Manchuria (1931) and Italy Ethiopia (1936). The first formative and crucial steps that paved the way for this expansion have been neglected. This analysis covers a range of social, political and economic parameters illuminating the diversity but also the common ground of the nature and aspirations of Japan's and Italy's early colonial systems. The two states alongside the Great Powers of the era expanded in the name of humanism and civilization but in reality in a way typically imperialistic, they sought territorial compensations, financial privileges and prestige. A parallel and deeper understanding of the nineteenth century socio-cultural-psychological parameters, such as tradition, mentality, and religion that shaped and explain the later ideological framework of Rome's and Tōkyō's expansionist disposition, has never been attempted before. This monograph offers a detailed examination of the phenomenon of colonialism by examining the issue from two different angles. The study contributes to the understanding of Italy's and Japan's early imperial expansion. In addition, it traces the origins of these states' similar and common historical evolution in late nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century.

The Battle of Adwa

The Battle of Adwa PDF Author: Raymond Jonas
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674062795
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 426

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Book Description
In March 1896 a well-disciplined and massive Ethiopian army did the unthinkable-it routed an invading Italian force and brought Italy's war of conquest in Africa to an end. In an age of relentless European expansion, Ethiopia had successfully defended its independence and cast doubt upon an unshakable certainty of the age-that sooner or later all Africans would fall under the rule of Europeans. This event opened a breach that would lead, in the aftermath of world war fifty years later, to the continent's painful struggle for freedom from colonial rule. Raymond Jonas offers the first comprehensive account of this singular episode in modern world history. The narrative is peopled by the ambitious and vain, the creative and the coarse, across Africa, Europe, and the Americas-personalities like Menelik, a biblically inspired provincial monarch who consolidated Ethiopia's throne; Taytu, his quick-witted and aggressive wife; and the Swiss engineer Alfred Ilg, the emperor's close advisor. The Ethiopians' brilliant gamesmanship and savvy public relations campaign helped roll back the Europeanization of Africa. Figures throughout the African diaspora immediately grasped the significance of Adwa, Menelik, and an independent Ethiopia. Writing deftly from a transnational perspective, Jonas puts Adwa in the context of manifest destiny and Jim Crow, signaling a challenge to the very concept of white dominance. By reopening seemingly settled questions of race and empire, the Battle of Adwa was thus a harbinger of the global, unsettled century about to unfold.

Historical Companion to Postcolonial Literatures - Continental Europe and its Empires

Historical Companion to Postcolonial Literatures - Continental Europe and its Empires PDF Author: Prem Poddar
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 0748650970
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 688

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Book Description
The first reference work to provide an integrated and authoritative body of information about the political, cultural and economic contexts of postcolonial literatures that have their provenance in the major European Empires of Belgium, Denmark, France, G