Fascist Italy’s project of transforming Libya into a colonial jewel in its crowd contains narratives of genocide, forced people’s movement, and oppression that still need to be narrated. This presentation focuses on how ho fascism changed once translated into the Libyan colonial space and on what colonialism is if articulated by fascism. In particular, Italo Balbo’s role as governor of Libya from 1934 to 1945 reveals through official documents a particular approach to colonialism and the process of whitening the coastal population to an Italian fourth shore. Balbo describes such a process by describing in detail how a southern European country intervenes in a northern African country’s culture in order to exorcise its own difficult transformation from an embodiment of a south into an inflected north that cannot, in the 1930s, call itself white.

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GraziellaParati, the Paul D. Paganucci Professor of Italian Literature and Language, is the Director of the Leslie Center for the Humanities at Dartmouth College. She is the author of numerous books including Public History, Private Stories: Italian Women’s Autobiography, Migration Italy: The Art of Talking back in a Destination Culture, and Mediterranean Crossroads: Migration Literature in Italy. Her co-edited books include Italian Cultural Studies (with Ben Lawton) and Multicultural Literature in Contemporary Italy (with Marie Orton). Parati’s in-progress book is titled: Un-Becoming Fascists: The Use of Political Autobiographies in Nation Building which is an analysis of the use of autobiography in everyday politics, starting from the obsession with autobiography in the Italian late 40s.