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Diana Garvin

HISTORIAN OF TRANSNATIONAL ITALY

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Articles

First choice

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

first choice

Paper Soldiers on the March: Colonial Toys for Imperial Play

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

Commended for the 2022 Sophie Coe Prize, Oxford Cookery Symposium

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

new5

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

Winner of the 2017 Russo and Linkon Award, Working-Class Studies Association

How to Eat an Empire

Building Pasta's Empire

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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The Pioneer's Feast

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.

Banana article

Fruit of Fascist Empire: Bananas and Italian Somaliland

Thanks to Mediterranean trade monopolies, bananas embodied Fascist imperialism.  

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The "Bread of the Gods" campaign cast Somali bananas as Italian commodities, the fruits of Fascist empire.  Through bananas, the Bread of the Gods campaign promoted three Fascist political projects critical to securing Italian women’s support for the Ethiopian occupation and the establishment of Italian East Africa.  Because bananas evoked Italy’s previous colonization of Somalia, and suggested that such ventures paid off with new foods, they could be used to advertise the benefits of imperialism to Italian consumers.  Supporting the imperial theme, ads emphasized bananas as food for the Fascist body project. They were high in sugar and vitamins.  Plus, they were easy to digest. Eating a banana meant using food as medicine to strengthen weak bodies: the elderly and the invalid, but also the young. “Bananas are the most complete and nutritious food after breast milk,” bolded text emphasized.  But why were Italian bodies so weak, and in need of fortification?  Perhaps inadvertently, the campaign slogan implied the answer: Fascist Italy lacked sufficient grain to feed the populous.  Benito Mussolini had launched the 10-year Battle for Grain in 1926, exhorting Italians to conserve bread and grow rice as a substitute. The Bread of the Gods campaign could have touted bananas as a luxurious fruit to please the palate.  But instead, they framed bananas as a substitute bread to fill the belly.  At home, alimentary autarky – producing and eating only Italian foods – started with exhausting labor in fields and paddies and ended with at the table with gray bowls of gluey rice.  But what if “Italian” foods – but brighter, tastier, and more nutritious - could come from colonies? A panacea and a godsend, the interwar adverting fantasy of the curative banana was a Fascist Italian legend, not a Somali one.

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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

Interpreting Urban Spaces in Italian Cultures

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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