Mabel Berezin

Cultural Form and Political Meaning: State-subsidized Theater, Ideology, and the Language of Style in Fascist Italy

The paradigm linking meaning and content has shaped the empirical focus of cultural focus of cultural analysis. The pattern of state theatrical subsidy within fascist Italy challenges the assumption that narrative content is the principal vehicle of meaning. By shifting the unit of analysis from the text of plays to discourses about theatrical production, a rhetoric of appropriation and reappropriation emerges between regime bureaucrats and cultural entrepreneurs that suggest that theatrical form, and not theatrical content, contained fascist meaning. This finding is extended to posit that the divorce between form and content that characterized the fascist theater also distinguished fascism from liberal democracy.

Book ReviewsItalian Cultural Studies: An Introduction. Edited by David Forgacs and Robert Lumley. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. Pp. xv+368.

Twentieth-century Italy is extraordinarily interesting, yet scholarly monographs as a gauge of social and political relevance suggest that Italy lost importance sometime in the 16th century. Works on modern and contemporary Italy appear as poor second cousins to Italian Renaissance studies, as well as more prestigious venues of European studies such as Germany, France, Scandinavia, and recently, Eastern Europe. But Italy is a major modern industrial nation that has coped, albeit in idiosyncratic manner, with the same problems as other modern nation-states—fascism and socialism in the early 20th century and, today, immigration, a resurgent right, problems of citizenship, and a declining welfare state. Robert Putnam’s study of Italian regional government (Making Democracy Work [Princeton, 1993]), which politicians as well as scholars have hailed as a model for contemporary democratic practice, has begun to call into question the myth of Italian exceptionalism. In a similar vein, Italian Cultural Studies, edited by David Forgacs and Robert Lumley, prolific British historians of contemporary Italian culture, seeks to contribute to evolving academic perceptions of Italy. The stated purpose of this anthology of 18 original essays is to bring “cultural studies” to Italy. Cultural studies has taken off in Britain, its home turf, and has migrated to the United States—the “English-speaking world,” as Forgacs and Lumley note in their first paragraph—but has been of little interest in Italy where “culture” is equated with high culture and is relegated to literature and art history departments. The editors attribute the Italian emphasis upon “culture” with a capital “C” to the valorization of print culture in a country that, until recently, had some of the highest rates of illiteracy in Western Europe, to the organization of intellectual life in which only the elites constituted a reading community, and to the interplay of Catholic and Communist cultures, which controlled what became part of the public sphere. Forgacs and Lumley assembled a group of 20 scholars, mostly historians and professors of “Italian studies” in Britain and Italy, to address diverse cultural topics. Pursuing the postmodern predilection for spatial metaphors, the editors organized the book in four sections: Geographies, Identities, Media, and, presumably borrowing from Raymond Williams,