Palimpsestic pedagogies: Mapping fascist violence against children from Mussolini’s dictatorship to present day Italy

Abstract

This essay focuses on the disavowed histories of Italy’s fascist past with a specific focus on how select historical disavowals reverberate in the present through the law of restricted citizenship, policies governing the lives of migrants, and recent pro-natal campaigns. I take as the occasion for my discussion, the 2017 exhibit at the Museo della Shoah in Rome, entitled “The Enemy Race: Nazi and Italian Fascist Propaganda.” Through representations of the child during Mussolini’s reign, the exhibit represents Mussolini’s investment in the Italian child, conceived of as Catholic, Aryan, and born on Italian soil. His regime aimed to cultivate a future generation that would purify the nation through physical vitality, a belief in racial elitism, and loyalty to the nation state, while casting Jewish and “non-Italian” children as enemy subjects. I argue that the pedagogical impulse of the Museo della Shoah aims, not only to represent life histories that have been imperfectly erased from post-war memory, but also to recognize such a project as an interminable process of reflection that unfolds in a country that continues to suffer under the weight of its disavowed colonial and anti-Semitic history.

KEYWORDS:

• Italian facism
• educational theory
• disavowal
• multidirectional memory
• Mussolini and the Italian child
• restricted citizenship in Italy

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

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Paula M. Salvio

Paula M. Salvio is Professor of Education and Affiliate Professor of Classics, Humanities, and Italian Studies at the University of New Hampshire. Along with her numerous articles and book chapters, she is the author of The Story-Takers: Public Pedagogy and Contemporary Italy’s Non-Violent Resistance Against the Mafia (Univ. of Toronto Press, 2017); Anne Sexton: Teacher of Weird Abundance, (SUNY Press, 2007); Community-based Media Pedagogies: Relational Practices of Listening in the Commons, (written with Bronwen Low and Chloe Brushwood Rose, Routledge Press, 2016); Love’s Return: Psychoanalytic Essays on Childhood, Teaching and Learning (Co-Edited with Gail Boldt, Routledge, 2006). Her current scholarship focuses on fascism, education, and teaching against omnipotence.