Ernest Ialongo, Associate Professor of History at Hostos Community College of The City University of New York.

In 1938, Italian Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini institutionalized antisemitism with the Racial Laws, and set in motion events that culminated in the Holocaust in Italy. Scholars have put forward a number of reasons for this new policy. However, all such reasons are specific to the life of Fascism itself. In this talk Dr. Ialongo proposes that Mussolini's attack on the Jews was also rooted in a longer-term trend in modern Italy since its unification in 1861, wherein the state sought to bolster a weak national consciousness by rallying the nation around purported internal enemies. Thus, the persecution of Italian Jews was disturbingly similar to the Liberal government's marginalization and assault on southern Italian rebels in the 1860s, anarchists in the 1870s, and Sicilian rebels in the 1890s-and, we continue to see this trend in the populist, anti-migrant movements in Italy today . 

Drawing on Rey Chow's notion of entanglement and Michael Rothberg's work on multidirectional memory, I look at the ways in which certain visual, lexical, and historical representations and tropes operate to create points of connection between the Shoah and contemporary migration to Italy across the Mediterranean. I argue that the deployment of these images is not intended to indicate similarities, or indeed, dissimilarities, between historical events. The network of association which is produced offers a space in which to critically and creatively interrogate past and present, and their possible interconnections.   Read