Culture, Things and Empire: RACE

Following the success of the first 'Culture, Things and Empire' seminar series (December 2020 to May 2021), we are returning for a new series with a specific focus on object-based research that illuminates the global and colonial context of visual and material culture, and the international circulation of objects and commodities. This series will consist of six seminars based on a particular theme held from March to July 2022. Each session will consist of two 20-minute papers followed by a Q&A.

RACE

Ilyas Azouzi (University College London)

Circulating the review Difesa della Razza. Racist propaganda and Empire in Fascist Italy

Abstract: In 1938, two years after the proclamation of its Empire, fascist Italy operated a crucial shift in its history whilst adopting racial laws designed to support both the exclusion of Jews from Italian society and the segregationist policy it would adopt within its colonies. Racism and antisemitism were justified by the birth of a new Roman empire which duty was to establish the superiority of the Italian race through domination and discrimination. To support this new policy, the Ministry of Popular Culture proposed the creation of a carefully studied racist propaganda meant to facilitate any legislative measures that the government deemed appropriate to take within the newly proclaimed Empire. The journal Difesa della Razza (Defense of the Race) was born in August 1938 as a state-sponsored magazine designed to back up this propaganda with the “scientific expertise” of a group of renowned scholars carefully selected. With a print run of more than 140.000 copies, the first issue of the magazine quicky reached schools, libraries, offices, and all forms of state-related institutions across de country and the colonies. Difesa della Razza combines within its pages pseudo-biological and cultural studies intended to show the belonging of the Italian race to Aryanism and to demonstrate its moral and anthropological superiority. The journal insists on the idea of a biological origin of fascism’s racism and aims to justify the necessity to avoid “contaminations” between Jews and Italians in Italy and with the non-European populations of the Empire. It shows a visual – disturbing – stereotyping that can undoubtedly confirm the power of images in the context of imperial fascist propaganda. I would like to propose the study of such a magazine as it reveals the carefully disseminated state-sponsored visions on racism. It is symptomatic of fascist Italy’s totalitarian desire for control, and allows a more complete reading of the conditions in which Italy built its empire in East Africa and Libya in terms of segregation, urbanism, housing, hygiene, sexuality, and economic exploitation, among others things.

Bio: Ilyas Azouzi received an MA in History of Art from Lausanne University and an MA in History and Theory of Architecture from the Bartlett School of Architecture (UCL). Since 2018, he has been studying for his PhD at UCL, where he taught Urban Geographies and History and received the Student Choice Award for Brilliant Research-based Education. His thesis focuses on the function of architectural theory in fascist colonial policy and analyses the role granted to Urbanistica during the imperial expansion of Italy (1936-1943). Ilyas has been a research fellow at the Istituto Svizzero di Roma (2021) and is currently awardee at the British School at Rome where he received the Raleigh Radford Rome Award.

Zineb Khemissi (University of Portsmouth)

‘War Waifs’ the Reflective American Narrative of Korean American Adoptees: A Longitudinal Case Study of Transnational Adoptees’ Hybrid Identity Negotiation within the Third Space.

Abstract: Throughout seventy years, over 200,000 South Korean Children have been displaced to the US for adoption (Kim, 2015; McKee, 2016). Transnational adoption (TNA) is known as the inclusion of nationally and racially different children within white households (Barn, 2013). This global phenomenon established from the 1950s onwards delimits the Korean War period, which engendered thousands of unwanted mixed-race children. In this paper, I argue on one hand, that media depictions of war orphans, legislative modifications along with the Christian Americanist’s discourse helped children displacement and commodification—as a post-cold-war-policy. The American paternalistic image served to maintain the established core-periphery relation which developed to a neocolonial control. On the other hand, children’s inclusion into the ‘global adoption market’ as commodities subjected them to laws of supply and demand. Assimilation was their only choice to fit-in the white backgrounds they were transplanted into (Hübinette, 2007). Korean American Adoptee (KADs) were often perceived as the foreign other, aliens and ‘outsiders within.’ They face issues of race, belonging which result into the construction of a hybrid identity in the third space ‘in-between’ along with their transnationally adopted peers. For this purpose, my research questions are: 1) How does media endorsement of TNA under the American narrative triggered the construction of a hybrid identity in the third space? 2) How do shared inter-generational experiences among KADs apply to other TN/TR adoptees globally? My data consist of adoptees’ books, media depictions of war orphans from the 1950s onwards (news briefings, newspaper articles…), the Side-by-Side project (adoptees narratives), film documentaries and blog posts. I use van Dijk’s Socio-cognitive approach to critical discourse analysis to reach a deeper understanding of adoptees’ case and decipher the power relations between the US and South Korea. I foreground ‘third space’ as a binding medium for a hybrid identity negotiation which redeems the physical split—or geographical displacement—besides the double-sided cultural dimensions KADs navigate between.

Bio: Zineb Khemissi, third year Algerian PhD researcher at The University of Portsmouth, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences; SASHPL. Graduated in American History and Literature. My research is interdisciplinary I am interested in history, politics, international relations, immigration and displacement, identity and belonging, psychology and the social sciences as a whole. My area of studies is related to both the US and South Korea. Critical Adoption Studies is my specialism field. I use CDA as a central approach for my thesis revolving around transnational adoptees’ identity negotiation and third space theories for an in-depth exploration of my case study population.