This study analyses the essential question of the role of visual and material culture in the construction of a mass racial ideology during the Fascist colonial empire. The hypothesis behind this essay is that representations of the facial features of colonised populations may be understood as agents that transform what are in fact inconsistent and vague notions of identity and race into concrete and effective ontologies, both in the scientific field and in the popular imaginary. The facial casts made by the anthropologist Lidio Cipriani and exhibited in the race pavilion of the very popular Mostra triennale delle Terre italiane d'Oltremare (1940) in Naples, the anthropological photographs and illustrations of the infamous journal La Difesa della razza (1938–43), and the advertising images representing African women's bodies, both gave consistency to the notion of race and incarnated its protean nature made up of narratives, metaphors, fantasies, and prejudices constructed and accumulated over time.

This article assesses Italy's participation in the Expo du Sahara in Paris in 1934, placing it within the framework of European colonial culture, exhibitions, and international relations during the 1930s. Hitherto, the Expo du Sahara has been largely ignored by historiography, but it offers important insights into Italo-French relations in the years immediately preceding Italy's invasion of Ethiopia, as well as the ways in which Fascist Italy sought national and international legitimacy through the medium of exhibitions. The Paris exhibition, staged by the European powers after years of clashes, was also a physical representation of the so-called ‘colonial concord’ and ‘peaceful’ partition of North Africa, processes in which Italy's role was fundamental.

This article assesses the Liberal and Fascist administrations’ shifting attitudes towards colonial concubinage during the years of the repression of the anti-colonial resistance in Italian Libya (1911–32). Also known as mabruchismo, concubinage in Libya closely resembled its counterpart in Italian Eastern Africa, as it involved middle- to upper-class Italian officers coercing colonised women into engaging in often exploitative intimate relationships. During the first 20 years of colonisation of the territory, the colony's military administration employed an ambiguous stance regarding the practice, condemning it discursively to ingratiate itself with the local elites while unofficially allowing it to provide safe sex to its officers. When the resistance was defeated in the early 1930s, and the Fascist administration began its demographic colonisation plans, colonial concubinage was prohibited as out of place in a racially segregated settler colony. This article employs an analysis of official archival sources to trace the regulatory framework that shaped the lives of the Libyan women and Italian officers engaged in concubinage in a shifting colonial society. The colonial administrations’’ regulatory efforts toward colonial concubinage testify to the crucial role that Libyan women and racially ‘‘mixed’’ relationships played in shaping categories of race, class, and gender relative to the Italian colonial context.

This paper intertwines the two historiographical concerns of migration and colonialism by exploring the case of Italian rule in North Africa from 1922 to 1943 and by adopting the analytic ground of the environment. The role played by the environment in targeting and shaping specific social groups, forming and grounding specific policies, creating and preventing social and natural transfers, has been overshadowed until now, particularly in relation to Italian colonialism. This study articulates the Fascist agricultural enterprise in Libya around the watershed event of the colony's 1932 pacification. To illustrate its development, it looks at the environment-making processes and transfers entailed in the transformation of the Italian colonial project. This reconstruction contributes to the environmental history subfields of migration and colonialism and invites historians to further explore the first decade of Italian rule in Libya and not to limit historical explorations to the lens of settler colonialism.

This essay focuses on the racialising devices that characterise some Italian colonial novels. Specifically, it looks at two novels of the late 1920s – Enrico Cappellina's Un canto nella notte. Romanzo coloniale and Guido Milanesi's La sperduta di Allah – with the aim of highlighting the continuities and discontinuities between the racist models they endorse. A critical close reading of the texts reveals the degree of interconnection between segregationist and inclusivist interpretations of the cross-racial colonial encounter in the first half of the ventennio. With this perspective, the 1936 imperial turning point, even though critical on the institutional level, appears less so in the cultural field of racist production.