Description
This roundtable addresses the IMS conference’s general theme on Global Mediterranean and Postcolonial Music Histories by re-assessing the role of Italian Fascist radio broadcasting against a global backdrop. Bringing together scholars from diverse disciplinary backgrounds—including ethnography, history, musicology, migration studies, and media studies—this session will discuss and problematize how Italian Fascism leveraged music and radio broadcasting to shape and disseminate propaganda across Mediterranean and global routes during the interwar period.
Between the 1920s and the 1940s, Italy witnessed the rise to power of Mussolini’s National Fascist Party, the expansion of its colonial domains in North and East Africa and the concurrent centralization and institutionalization of emerging cultural and technological forms such as radio broadcasting. As radio became a mass medium and public institution, infrastructural investments in long-distance transmissions (particularly in short-wave broadcasting), alongside the imperialistic drive and the drastic change in international diplomacy brought about by the Fascism regime, cooperated in establishing new world-wide channels for circulation and dissemination of national music, and cultural and sonic propaganda.
This roundtable examines how these changes re-shaped the soundscape along various axes within and from the Mediterranean, and how these soundscapes contributed to political and cultural projects of territorial expansion while simultaneously fostering assimilationist narratives abroad. By addressing these questions, the roundtable participants will also reflect on the value of an interdisciplinary approach to analyze the intersections of mediated sound, politics, and mobility.
In their joint intervention titled “Mediterranean Radioscapes: Locating Italy’s Radio Programming in its Imperialist and Global Fascist Context (1930-1939),” two of the participants will focus primarily on the role played by Fascist radio broadcasting in connecting ties with allies and with the newly conquered territories. They will first address how Italian state broadcaster EIAR established new infrastructural facilities to support shortwave transmissions directed toward Eastern and Northern Africa populations. Secondly, they will deal with music-focused programming pursued in Italy’s programme exchanges and joint broadcasts with Germany and Japan, with an attention to the musical repertoire used to perform Italy’s newly proclaimed ‘Roman Empire. The next contribution, “From the Mediterranean to the Atlantic: Fascist Propaganda and American Assimilation in the IBC Radioscape (1930-1941)” will illustrate how Italian Fascist ideology and propaganda intruded and influenced political imaginaries and listening practices among the Italian listeners of the International Broadcasting Corp network in 1930s and the 1940a United States.
Finally, the paper titled “The Call of the Motherland: Fascist Radio Propaganda for Italians in the United States,” will explore how Italian-language radio programs, broadcast both from Italy and U.S. commercial stations, sought to align Italian Americans with Mussolini’s foreign policy. These radio programs fostered a connection to the ancestral homeland, but they ultimately failed to weaken Italian Americans’ loyalty to the United States.
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