Text

theses

This dissertation examines confino, or forced internal exile in Fascist Italy. My work follows a cultural, aesthetic, and theoretical trajectory that integrates disparate types of texts, including juridical statutes that formed the legal organization of Italy, political speeches and statements, novels, memoirs, and film, in order to tease out the ways in which the Fascist regime sought to immobilize its political opponents and practice chirurgia fascista—a term Benito Mussolini uses in his “Discorso dell’Ascensione” in 1927 to justify the removal and exile of those who opposed him. The aim of this project is to theorize confino and its spaces, functions, surveillance mechanisms, and modes of resistance in order to reveal how the confinati respond to the regime’s politics of exile. At times, their actions reveal the extent to which they are constrained to an unproductive existence in an equally sterile space, while, at other times, their actions reveal the ability to develop a productive politics capable of successfully opposing the tyranny of the fascist regime. Thus, I propose that we examine the confino experience through the following categories: restriction, resistance, and (re)construction. I argue that the confinati and those who narrate and represent the confino experience understand and respond to the repressive politics of the fascist regime through these three categories, ultimately articulating an experience of exile that finds its locus in space, the body, and language.

ETD_10877

doi:10.7282/t3-8n00-gc39

Ph.D.

Includes bibliographical references

ETD doctoral

The author owns the copyright to this work.