Gianmarco Mancosu, “Watching Films in Italian East Africa (1936-1941): Fascist Ambitions, Contradictions, and Anxieties,” Journal of Modern Italian Studies 26:3 (2021), pp. 261-290.
The Society for Italian Historical Studies is delighted to choose Gianmarco Mancosu’s article “Watching Films in Italian East Africa (1936-1941). Fascist Ambitions, Contradictions, and Anxieties,” published in the Journal of Modern Italian Studies in May 2021 as co-winner for this year’s Article Prize in Modern Italian History. In this essay Mancosu provides a rich analysis of film distribution and reception in the Horn of Africa in the wake of Italy’s occupation of Ethiopia. The article engages productively with the vast literature on colonial cinema, setting the case of Italian East Africa in a broad transnational network of exchanges between state officials and commercial actors. Mancosu also charts the diversity of local experiences, attending to the complexity of everyday interactions between colonizers and indigenous populations. This capacious methodology explores cinema as a social process in which the cultural and political contradictions of fascist colonialism come in full relief. The article is theoretically grounded, clearly written, and thoroughly documented. We commend Mancosu for his innovative research and wish him a long and productive career.
In the below-provided video, Dr. Amanda Madden and Dr. Mancosu discuss the research behind “Watching Films in Italian East Africa (1936-1941),” among other topics.