Fascist Spectacle: The Aesthetics of Power in Mussolini's Italy (Studies on the History of Society and Culture) (Volume 28) First Edition

In Fascist Spectacle: The Aesthetics of Power in Mussolini’s Italy, Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi explores the portrayal of authority and power in Fascist Italy. Fascist Spectacle addresses the roles of art, culture, symbols, consumerism and war in Italian society during Mussolini’s reign. The author is less interested in the realities of these topics than she is in the discourse surrounding them during this era. She views these areas of discourse (rituals, myths and images), “as an essential element in the formation of the fascist regime’s self-identity, the construction of its goals and definition of ends, the making of its power.” (Falasca-Zamponi, p. 20) The key to her argument is that a public narrative of Italian fascism was created to validate and support Mussolini’s government.I find her argument that the “story” of fascism was malleable particularly engaging. In her argument that Mussolini’s narrative of the March on Rome was more important than the factual reality, she is engaging the idea of the politics of memory. Collective memory can and is used by leaders to reach political goals, whether it is the suppression of opposition, the validation of power or the creation of a national identity to further political aims. Collective memory often bears little resemblance to the historical realities of the remembered event, but the memory holds far more power over a population than the facts.Her argument here reminds me of Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s work, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. Trouillot finds history somewhere in between “what happened” and “what was said to have happened” – a history defined by silences, be they intentional exclusions or by-products of the reconciliation of facts with worldview. Silencing the Past also addresses silences created as public memory redefines the significance of an event. Trouillot believes that power is exerted in the historical process during the creation of primary sources, during the archival processes, during the initial interpretation of events and during the subsequent reinterpretation of events. Trouillot argues “the value of a historical product cannot be debated without taking into account both the context of its production and the context of its consumption.” (Trouillot, p. 146) For Falasca-Zamponi and Trouillot, history, like human memory, is not fixed but malleable and it is the manipulation that should be the focus of historical inquiry.