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Diana Garvin

HISTORIAN OF ITALY AND EAST AFRICA

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Articles

First choice

Dollies for the Duce: The Politics of Playtime in Fascist Italy

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Paper Soldiers on the March: Colonial Toys for Imperial Play

Forthcoming with Design Issues

Reproductive health care

Reproductive Healthcare from Fascism to Forza

First choice

Militarizing Monopoly: Game Designs for Wartime

Italian coffee triangle - 1 choice

The Italian Coffee Triangle: From Brazilian Colonos to Ethiopian Colonialisti

Fascist Foodways

Fascist Foodways: Ricettari as Propaganda for Grain Production and Sexual Reproduction

Black Markets

Black Markets: Fascist Constructions of Race in East African Marketplace Newsreels

Constructing Race

Constructing Race through Commercial Space: Merkato Ketema under Fascist Urban Planning

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Riding the Stockcar to Sleep in the Stable: Migrant Agricultural Labor and Songs of Rebellion

Taylorist Breastfeeding

Taylorist Breastfeeding in Rationalist Clinics: Constructing Industrial Motherhood in Fascist Italy

Singing Truth to Power

Singing Truth to Power: Melodic Resistance and Bodily Revolt in Italy’s Rice Fields

How to Eat an Empire

How to Eat an Empire: East Africa and Italian Food Industry

Food companies used East African imagery to advertise Italian foods, like pasta.

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This article uses culinary ephemera from 1896 to 1943 to investigate how Italian food companies have historically framed North and East Africa in terms of consumable goods. I anchor this article in the Fascist ventennio, the apex of Italian colonialism.  The introduction examines how dictator Benito Mussolini’s ten-year Battle for Grain (1925-1935) primed the nation – agriculturally, economically, and militarily – to support the invasion of East Africa (1935). Previous scholarship on la cucina coloniale (Emanuela Scarpellini, 2014) provides the broad terms for how Italian empire in Africa was then translated into food via naming practices that conflated the color of food and people, with Assab licorice and Africanette sponge cake becoming popular in continental Italy.  I add to this scholarship with new materials, like pasta packaging and steamship menus, from the Musei delle Aziende chain.  Because the industrialization of major Italian food companies coincided with colonialism, the advertising and packaging of these brands absorbed the racial terms in currency from the 1890s to 1940s.  Rapid commercialization during the Fascist period froze colonial depictions in place, visually connecting dark-colored food products, like coffee and chocolate, with North and East African people (Karen Pinkus, 1995).  Consider, for example, Severo Sepo’s pugno nell’occhio images of cacao laborers produced for Perugina chocolates.  But surprisingly, food companies also used colonial imagery to advertise the most emblematically Italian of foods, like pasta.  To investigate this paradox, an Italian food cast in colonial terms, this article follows the paradoxical entanglement of pasta, as well as grains more largely, including teff, polenta, and coucous, in Italian commercial narratives of empire.  At stake in these inquiry lies the shifting question of national identity as expressed through local cuisine.
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Eat Like a Colonist: Six Menus from Italian East Africa

Six menus tell the story of the Battle of Adwa, steamship trips, and the agricultural colonies.

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This article treats culinary ephemera as a Fascist-period midden, a not-so-ancient trash heap from which we might excavate the artifacts of empire.  They reveal the successive stages of construction of culinary racism, a collection of commercial narratives that continue to shape how we often talk about African and European diet and culture today.  Persuasion, during the Fascist period, went hand in hand with propaganda.  I read these menus, created to celebrate battlefield victories, steamship journeys, and settlement soirees, as culinary propaganda, produced by private companies to support Fascism’s imperial projects in East Africa.  Menus produced by shipping companies (Rex, Lloyd Triestino) and banks (Banca di Roma) for use by Italian colonists on Ethiopian settlements speaks to the corporatist economics of Fascism, demonstrating how private companies, used food to uphold and extend Fascist narratives of racial superiority.  Herein lies a core contention of this article: the true engine of fascist power lay in its financial supporters – that is, in the corporations that provided the steamships and settlements in Eritrea and Ethiopia, and who penned some of the most popular narratives of culinary racism in Italy.

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Cut-Throat: The Battle of Adwa according to Razor Blades

Forthcoming with The Everyday Life History Reader: Working with Sources

First choice

Colonie and the Cult of Youth in Fascist Architecture

Forthcoming with The City and Civilization: Representations of Urban Spaces in Italian Culture

Imperial Board Games

Imperial Board Games for Future Colonists

Forthcoming with Are You Game?  A Cultural History of Board Games

Routlege Companion to Sexuality

Interracial Wetnursing in Italian East Africa

Representing Italy through Food

Producing Consumers: Gendering Italy through Food Advertisements

First choice

Communicative Blogging for Student Engagement and Blended Literacy

first choice

Autarchic by Design: Aesthetics and Politics of Kitchenware

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To the Origins of Biopolitics

Theory after Theory

The Person and Human Life

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