Archive | 2019
Futurism and Science Fiction
Abstract
This chapter focuses on Futurist science fiction literature’s contribution to the Italian colonial enterprise. It analyzes Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s Mafarka le futuriste: Roman africain (1909), focusing on the derogatory representation of Africa and Africans. Moreover, it examines Lo Zar non e morto (1931), a collective work by the Dieci (the Ten). This novel was published in the early 1930s, when the regime was enacting a heavy propaganda campaign to prepare the populace for the conquest of a new empire. The analysis shows that while Mafarka expressed generic fantasies of domination in the wake of the Libyan War of 1911–12, Lo Zar non e morto expresses more openly racist, sexist, and anti-communist sentiments, in line with the regime’s racist policies in the 1930s.