Italy's sea : empire and nation in the Mediterranean, 1895-1945

Resource Information

The work Italy's sea : empire and nation in the Mediterranean, 1895-1945 represents a distinct intellectual or artistic creation found in European University Institute Library. This resource is a combination of several types including: Work, Language Material, Books.

Label

Italy's sea : empire and nation in the Mediterranean, 1895-1945

Title remainder

empire and nation in the Mediterranean, 1895-1945

Statement of responsibility

Valerie McGuire

Creator

• McGuire, Valerie

Subject

• Dodecanese Islands (Greece) -- Colonization | History -- 20th century
• Dodecanese Islands (Greece) -- Politics and government -- 20th century
• Italy -- History, Military -- 20th century

Language

eng

Summary

For much of the twentieth century the Mediterranean was a colonized sea. Italy's Sea: Empire and Nation in the Mediterranean (1895-1945) reintegrates Italy, one of the least studied imperial states, into the history of European colonialism. It takes a critical approach to the concept of the Mediterranean in the period of Italian expansion and examines how within and through the Mediterranean Italians navigated issues of race, nation and migration troubling them at home as well as transnational questions about sovereignty, identity, and national belonging created by the decline and collapse of the Ottoman empire in North Africa, the Balkans, and the eastern Mediterranean, or Levant. While most studies of Italian colonialism center on the encounter in Africa, Italy's Sea describes another set of colonial identities that accrued in and around the Aegean region of the Mediterranean, ones linked not to resettlement projects or to the rhetoric of reclaiming Roman empire, but to cosmopolitan imaginaries of Magna Graecia, the medieval Christian crusades, the Venetian and Genoese maritime empires, and finally, of religious diversity and transnational Levantine Jewish communities that could help render cultural and political connections between the Italian nation at home and the overseas empire in the Mediterranean. Using postcolonial critique to interpret local archival and oral sources as well as Italian colonial literature, film, architecture, and urban planning, the book brings to life a history of mediterraneita or Mediterraneanness in Italian culture, one with both liberal and fascist associations, and enriches our understanding of how contemporary Italy-as well as Greece-may imagine their relationships to Europe and the Mediterranean today. --

Member of

• Transnational Italian cultures, 5

Assigning source

Provided by publisher

Dewey number

325.345049587

Illustrations

• illustrations
• maps

Index

index present

Literary form

non fiction

Nature of contents

bibliography

Series statement

Transnational Italian cultures

Series volume

5