New book on Italian colonial expansion in the Mediterranean published by MECACS member Dr Valerie McGuire
For much of the twentieth century the Mediterranean was a colonized sea. Italy’s Sea: Empire and Nation in the Mediterranean (1895-1945) takes a critical approach to the concept of the Mediterranean in the period of Italian expansion and examines how, within and through the Mediterranean, Italians navigated issues of race, nation and migration as well as transnational questions about sovereignty, identity, and national belonging which were created by the decline and collapse of the Ottoman empire in North Africa, the Balkans, and the eastern Mediterranean, or Levant. Using postcolonial critique to interpret local archival and oral sources as well as Italian colonial literature, film, architecture, and urban planning, the book brings to life a history of mediterraneità or Mediterraneanness in Italian culture, one with both liberal and fascist associations, and enriches understanding how contemporary Italy—as well as Greece—may imagine their relationships to Europe and the Mediterranean today.