Impending Modernity

Fascism and the Ambivalent Image of the United States

Datos Bibliográficos

ID10074020
AutoresEmilio Gentile (autor de correspondencia)
Año1993
Volumen28
Número1
Páginas7-29
Fecha de publicación1993-01-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaJournal of Contemporary History (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0022-0094 • E-ISSN: 1461-7250
EditorialSAGE Publishing (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1177/002200949302800102
OpenAlexW2169467887
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas9
Referencias citadas1

The fascist portrayal of the United States in the interwar period followed a parabolic trajectory. From a casual interest in the regime's early years there followed, in the second half of the 1920s, a growing curiosity. But it was above all in the following decade, and especially as a result of the 1929 crash and the coming of the New Deal, that interest in American politics, culture and society on the part of various intellectuals, writers, men of letters, journalists and occasional travellers, both fascist and non-fascist, increased rapidly, only to decline again during the war. A brief enquiry shows that ten books on the United States were published in Italy between 1922 and 1929, fifty-one between 1930 and 1940, and seven between 1941 and 1943. The majority of these books, like most of the articles published by fascist political and cultural magazines, projected directly or indirectly a certain image of'American civilization'. It is not the aim of this article to give a complete survey of these images, nor to evaluate the extent to which they were rational, realistic or revealed a real knowledge of the country which lay behind the images and which, in many cases, was rather limited. This article will restrict itself to outlining some of the principal aspects of the image of the United States, in order to suggest how it was significant to fascist culture, especially in relation to the fascists' attitude towards modernity. If American civilization was 'the most stupendous and powerful phenomenon of modernity in the world', as Luigi Barzini, Sr wrote in 1931,' Americanism was, for fascist culture, one of the main mythical metaphors of modernity, which was perceived ambivalently, as a phenomenon both terrifying and fascinating. The controversy about different images of America can be regarded as a variation of the

Aesthetics · Ambivalence · Art · Casual · Civilization · Curiosity · Economic history · Modernity · Period (music · Political science · Politics · Psychoanalysis · History · Italian Fascism and Post-war Society · Law · Psychology