From shock to Fascist propaganda. The images of colonialism in Italian textbooks

In the field of research on social representations of national history, the case study of representations referred to aspects of the in-group past that are reluctantely narrated in social discourse appears to be understudied. Colonial aggressions perpetrated by the Fascist regime against North-Africans populations allow to explore some interesting facets of this issue. Since a massive self-censorship still now covers up the war crimes committed by the Army under the order of Mussolini, Italian younger generations scarcely know this period of their national past, oftentimes euphemisticly labeled as “an adventure”. Due to its institutional task, school teaching is one of the few sources conveying historical contents about this shameful period. The aim of this paper is to present a first analysis of images used in 42 Italian textbooks (21 referred to history teaching and 21 to geography teaching, used in a time span ranging from 1950 to 2024). In these texts, narratives were selected describing Mussolini's attempts to create an Italian colonial domination in some North African lands, defined as Oriental Italian Empire (OIE). As it well known, this “Empire”, represented by the Fascist propaganda as the renewal of the glorious Roman Empire, collapsed in a very short time, together with the Fascist regime. To detect both continuities and discontinuities in the representations of this difficult period of the past, a longitudinal visual rhetorical analysis (VRA) was conducted on images complementing the narratives referred to the OIE. This qualitative analysis showed that, through out the time span considered, many textbooks images were simply importing the propaganda tools created during the colonial wars. These images are mostly focused on a representation of “us”, depicting Italians as victims of other European colonial Empires trying to force Italy to remain in her role of the “Great Proletarian”. Beside this longue durée of propaganda images, more recent books show images documenting violent acts of Italian Army, sometimes even using shocking photos of war crimes. Taking into account that, in the frame of the Horizon 2023 Project CONCILIARE, similar VRA analyses were conducted on images taken from other national textbooks, future studies will check if shocking images of colonial violence are used only in the Italian case, suggesting a relation between this recent editorial choice and the need to break a long lasting societal self-censorship. Moreover, we plan a fine-grained qualitative analysis of texts siding the propaganda images used in Italian textbooks, to better understand if the frequency of this kind of old images in recent texts is part of a new critical stance on past Fascist rethoric, or is an unaware reinforcement of the regime gaze, and therefore is implicitly opposing the verbal contents of textbooks.