Chapter 5 recounts the story of Giorgio Amendola from his birth in 1907 through the complexities of his family life and politics until his father’s death. His father’s murder and his combative personality ensured that he dismissed liberal Anti-Fascism as hopelessly feeble and, in 1929, he joined the Communist Party of Italy (PCdI). He soon left for Paris and for his education as a party chief in the making, notably from the Machiavellian Palmiro Togliatti, his ‘second father’. Giorgio loved Paris, City of the Revolution; he did not visit Leningrad or Moscow until after 1945. A young working-class woman called Germaine Lecocq, almost the embodiment of Paris, came suddenly into his life in a story of love at first sight. Unlike his parents’ marriage, it remained that way. The couple’s marriage and first full sexual encounter occurred on the prison island of Ponza. Not long afterwards, a daughter was born with some difficulty in Rome; Germaine’s mother arrived and thereafter remained part of their family. Eventually they moved back to Paris, and, after a brief time in Tunisia, they stayed in France until Giorgio crossed the Italian border to become a fighting partisan in April 1943.

In the Conclusion, I record the rival fates of Giovanni and Giorgio Amendola since 1980, whether in scholarship, public memory or Italian streetscapes. In each regard, the liberal democrat Giovanni Amendola has moved up and the communist Giorgio Amendola down. The (humane) communist world Giorgio believed in has all but totally disappeared. But liberal democracy, however much transmuted by an all but totalitarian neoliberalism, has prospered and, perhaps, triumphed. Certainly, when the centenary of Giovanni’s death occurs in 1926, it is likely that he will be celebrated as a father of his patria. What might be viewed as the historical limitations of his understanding of where the world was going, his all but non-existent commentary on capitalism and finance, his patriarchalism, his positive view of Italian imperialism – these no longer matter. He can take the leading place as his country’s most admirable saint and martyr of Anti-Fascism.

Chapter 4 examines the relationship between Giovanni Amendola and Nelia Pavlova, born 1895. This complex love story has been all but entirely ignored by Italian scholarship on Giovanni and in the national memory. Apparently, the couple had a son who died of meningitis at the age of six in 1929. In Giovanni’s papers there is evidence of the love affair but no acknowledgement of the child. Since Nelia also claims on occasion to have been ‘married’ to Giovanni, some doubt must remain about the veracity of her account. She was a young woman who resembled Eva Kühn in quite a few ways: foreign, multilingual, independent, from her country’s leading political classes, intellectually able. Nelia was one the three people at Giovanni’s deathbed in Cannes (Giorgio was another). Over time, however, the Amendolas, as they put it, ‘lost contact’ with her. Yet she made for herself a distinguished career as a Paris journalist, an expert in Eastern Europe. While the Amendola sons became communists, she remained a liberal democrat, as well as a woman who always remembered Giovanni as her man. Her death probably occurred in 1940. She should not have been forgotten as easily as she has been.

Brazilian novelist, playwright, and journalist Antônio Callado (1917-97) became, in the second half of the twentieth century, synonymous with cultural resistance against the Brazilian military dictatorship (1964-85). Documents and scripts found in 2014 at the BBC Written Archives unveil Callado’s experience as a writer working for the BBC Latin American Service in Britain, broadcasting anti-fascist propaganda in Portuguese to Brazilian audiences during World War II. In Brazil, Getúlio Vargas’ dictatorial regime Estado Novo (1937-45) was still emerging from internal clashes between pro-fascist and pro-Allies political factions, which preceded Brazil’s entry into the conflict in August 1942. In Britain between 1941 and 1947, Callado was able to engage with cosmopolitan intellectual networks and to explore literary influences that were not part of the aesthetic and political vocabulary of Brazilian modernists in the 1920s and 1930s. Callado’s socialist turn – which resulted in his political arrests in the 1960s and 1970s – was considerably influenced by his formative war-years. His experiences during World War II also deeply informed the political aspects of his writing, which denounced and derided Brazilian authoritarianism.

Brazilian novelist, playwright, and journalist Antônio Callado (1917-97) became, in the second half of the twentieth century, synonymous with cultural resistance against the Brazilian military dictatorship (1964-85). Documents and scripts found in 2014 at the BBC Written Archives unveil Callado’s experience as a writer working for the BBC Latin American Service in Britain, broadcasting anti-fascist propaganda in Portuguese to Brazilian audiences during World War II. In Brazil, Getúlio Vargas’ dictatorial regime Estado Novo (1937-45) was still emerging from internal clashes between pro-fascist and pro-Allies political factions, which preceded Brazil’s entry into the conflict in August 1942. In Britain between 1941 and 1947, Callado was able to engage with cosmopolitan intellectual networks and to explore literary influences that were not part of the aesthetic and political vocabulary of Brazilian modernists in the 1920s and 1930s. Callado’s socialist turn – which resulted in his political arrests in the 1960s and 1970s – was considerably influenced by his formative war-years. His experiences during World War II also deeply informed the political aspects of his writing, which denounced and derided Brazilian authoritarianism.

The tendency in our political moment for fascists to appropriate medieval symbols and stories for their own ends was preceded by the same phenomenon in the middle of the twentieth century. Then, as now, thinkers of various kinds challenged the Nazi mischaracterization of the Middle Ages, with some thinkers going even further, finding in the medieval world potential solutions to problems that plague modernity. Hannah Arendt was one of those thinkers. Her engagement with the Middle Ages was profound, stemming from her dissertation on St Augustine, to her sustained discussion of both Augustine and John Duns Scotus in her final work, The Life of the Mind. Arendt’s appropriation of these thinkers was political in the early part of her career, in which Augustine provided her with a framework for a political community based on the shared experience of loving one’s neighbor, a vision she articulated in her dissertation, Love and Saint Augustine, but that also appeared at key moments as a potential solution to the problems discussed in The Origins of Totalitarianism. Later in her career, Arendt’s writings on medieval thinkers turned more phenomenological, as she explored those aspects of the human condition that underpinned her earlier political work. For Arendt, Augustine, and especially Duns Scotus, provided a robust understanding of free will, which is necessary for political activity and the creation of new forms of living together. Ultimately, Arendt beliefs, especially about race, make it impossible to uncritically adopt her positions in our own moment. And yet, her thoughts about the Middle Ages can still provide us important ways to think about our present crises.

Chapter 7 examines how General Jorge Ubico, a strong-arm dictator (1931–44), rapidly expanded the state into the countryside and challenged planter sovereignty in the midst of the rise of German National Socialism. Ubico replaced forced wage labor with vagrancy laws and instituted sanitation and militarized rural education programs. Even as he expanded the repressive state apparatus, Ubico also appealed to the masses through direct intervention in local affairs, particularly on behalf of poor women, and by promising access to civilization in the future via sanitation and eugenic programs. Ubico’s efforts at state centralization, however, were countered by the consolidation of regional identities in Alta Verapaz around Tezulutlán, the name given to the region by the Nahua allies of Pedro Alvarado. This anti-imperialist regional identity expressed growing anti-German nationalism. Ladinos and Germans also sought to possess Maya culture as a source of authenticity and timeless tradition as they competed for claims to the region. These new celebrations of Maya authenticity provided a place for Maya patriarchs to reassert their authority as representatives of rural Mayas.

Chapter 3 turns to cultural expressions -- music, literature, art, and film -- to show the transnational manifestations of Mexico’s black radical tradition, especially as explored by caricaturist Miguel Covarrubias, composer Carlos Chávez, and historian and novelist José Mancisidor. This complex geographic matrix, with cultural centers in Mexico City, Cuba, Harlem, and Spain, was more visible in the interdisciplinary threads of culture than in the dense footnotes of historicism. Music -- jazz, in particular -- came to symbolize the simultaneous recasting of postrevolutionary nationalism and blackness in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s. This chapter traces these cultural conversations from Mexico’s first encounters with jazz in New York City through its incorporation into the Marxist cultural politics of 1930s Mexico and then abroad again, as Mexican cultural producers working with African American and Afro-Cubanist (afrocubanista) intellectuals like Langston Hughes and Nicolás Guillén fought against global fascism in Mexico, New York City, and Spain.