Studying Fascism transculturally: Italian scholarship in the international arena

In 2005, Enzo Traverso argued that a very problematic trend was affecting German memory culture and scholarship about Nazism. Echoing an alarm raised earlier by Timothy Mason, the scholar contended that at least since the 1980s there had been a progressive ‘disparition de la notion de “fascism” du champ historiographique’ (disappearance of the concept of ‘fascism’ from historiography) (p.94). The phenomenon observed by Traverso has found concrete materialisation in the EU's politics of memory developed throughout the twenty-first century. As Filippo Focardi argues in his work Nel cantiere della memoria (2020), the EU memory discourse has been shaped around a totalitarian paradigm centred on the memorialisation of Nazi and Communist crimes, in which the notion of a general form of fascism finds little space, and Italian Fascism only exists as a marginal epiphenomenon. This situation has begun to change in recent years as the growing success of far-right movements across the globe has brought international attention to the concept of fascism. Many Italian scholars, who have never ceased to study fascism, are now directing their efforts towards the international arena to contribute to a discussion that seems to have acquired particular significance for the understanding of our time. L'articolo recensisce e discute criticamente tre opere recenti sul Fascismo italiano pubblicate in lingua inglese, esplorando alcuni punti di tensione nella storiografia contemporanea. Rethinking Fascism: The Italian and German Dictatorships , curato da Filippo Focardi e Andrea Di Michele, raccoglie capitoli di eminenti studiosi di fascismo e nazismo, fornendo al lettore le basi per un'analisi comparativa del dibattito storiografico sulle due principali dittature fasciste europee. Italian Fascism 1914–1945: Themes and Interpretations di Claudia Baldoli è preso in considerazione come un tentativo riuscito di offrire una panoramica riassuntiva e puntuale della storiografia sul fascismo italiano. La recensione elogia l'attenzione che Baldoli conferisce al problema del consenso del fascismo e sottolinea la necessità di portare avanti un'indagine ancora più rigorosa sulle complicità della società italiana nei crimini del regime. Late Fascism: Race, Capitalism, and the Politics of Crisis di Alberto Toscano offre delle importanti prospettive teoriche per riflettere sui fascismi e sui legami tra fascismo e capitalismo. Pur apprezzando molte delle intuizioni di Toscano, la recensione mette