• 1 Jane Coaston, ‘The intersectionality wars’, Vox, May 28, 2019. See: https://www.vox.com/the-highlig (...)

1This essay examines Italian food advertising during fascism, from 1922 to 1943. It aims to approach the topic considering the “materiality of racism”, namely the numerous ways through which race, gender, class—and other individual/collective factors (age, ethnicity, generation, etc.)—combine to produce specific taxonomies and genealogies of racialisation, explicit visual representations and consequential forms of power and exploitation. It will adopt an intersectional approach, as theorised by Kimberlé Crenshaw’s analysis of the “stubborn endurance of the structure of white dominance”.1 In particular, the investigation of the visuality of food advertising is devoted to discovering multiple forms of representations and power relations.

• 2 Edward Said, Orientalism, New York, Penguin Books, 1979, 9.

2In the framework of European colonialism, colonised subjects were represented as inferiors, and overseas territories were viewed as fertile new spaces open to European conquests. After this first act of naming and subjectification, colonial propaganda made way for military invasion. In this specific context, it is shallow, reducing, and belittling to ponder on racism, sexism and other forms of discrimination simply as an image, a representation or an imaginary. This is because a specific image, representation and imagination is not only deeply connected to an oblique relationship of power, dependence and subjectivation/objectivation imposed on black colonised bodies by white Eurocentric gazes: it is part of it. As pointed out by Edward Said, while the Orient—and I would like to add the colonial world—“was almost a European invention”,2 it is precisely with the invention of the colonised subject—and thus through the process of racialisation, sexualisation and other countless forms of discrimination—that Europe re-invented part of its modernity. In this sense, the “materiality of racism” involves social, daily and intimate perceptions of senses: tastes, odours, tactile dimensions, sounds, as well as a large body of images and then again emotions and symbology, desires and repulsions.

• 3 See official Salce website: http://www.collezionesalce.beniculturali.it (accessed Dec. 4, 2024).
• 4 Stuart Hall, Race, the floating signifier, 1997 (62 min).

3As pointed out, to achieve this level of interpretation, the essay will analyse visual representations of food advertisements: posters, billboards, tags and brochures of the most important collection, though it is not well studied by historiography: Salce, which is located in the Museo Nazionale of Treviso and fully uploaded on a freely accessible website.3 The investigation of this underestimated collection could be a harbinger for a new historical interpretation of Italian colonialism and its legacies. That being said, this essay will limit itself to a critical discourse analysis of the visual sources mentioned above, applying Stuart Hall’s approach,4 namely examining multiple and different racialised and sexualised representations of black bodies. It will attempt to take a broader perspective which seeks to combine studying the role of advertising in the dissemination of Italian colonial propaganda in the public sphere and a social, racialised construction of taste.

• 5 Barbara Sorgoni, Parole e corpi. Antropologia, discorso giuridico e politiche sessuali interraziali (...)
• 6 Sandra Ponzanesi, ‘The Color of love: madamismo and interracial relationships in the italian coloni (...)
• 7 See Barbara Spackman, Fascist virilities. rhetoric, ideology, and social fantasy in Italy. Minneapo (...)

6Barbara Sorgoni5 examined the theme of the body during colonialism, paying attention to colonial laws, white Italian soldiers’ sexual desires and the idea of conquest in the Italian imaginary. Sandra Ponzanesi6 focused on interracial relationships in the Italian colonies, explaining the tension between colonised women and Italian soldiers. Looking at food consumption during fascism from a gender perspective, one can observe that the profile of potential consumers interested in buying foods or drinks advertised through a racialised representation of black bodies is certainly that of a man. Or, more precisely, these typologies of advertising refer to concepts of masculinity on which fascism relied to affirm its power.7

• 8 The Istituto Luce was an Italian film agency, created during Fascism whose aim was to produce films (...)

7Fascist colonial propaganda was dedicated to emphasising the role of the fatherland (Patria, in Italian, the land of the fathers) and it had a civilising mission: these themes were disseminated in the public sphere by both regime propaganda and private narratives through different media (radio, newspapers, Istituto Luce,8 cinema, etc.). It sounds like a masculine therapy in order to face capitalistic modernity. As pointed out by Giulietta Stefani:

• 10 See: Barbara Spadaro, Una colonia Italiana. Incontri, memorie e rappresentazioni tra Italia e Libia(...)

8Since the first colonial war in Libya in 1911–1912, ‘abroad’ became a place where masculinity was tested. A concrete example is the idea of a new Italy emerging with the conquest of the fourth shore (la quarta sponda, in Italian), giving Italians who emigrated to America and everywhere else the opportunity to come back home.10 The African dream attracted a heterogeneous group of male profiles and characters: soldiers, aviators, volunteer soldiers, small businessmen and farmers. For different reasons, they all considered the colony as a way to restore their spirits, as a fulfilment of a masculine attitude that found no possibilities for expression in Italy.

• 12 Barbara Spadaro, Una colonia italiana. Incontri, memorie e rappresentazioni tra Italia e Libia, Mil (...)
• 13 See: Robert Young, White mythologies. writing history and the West, New York, Routledge, 2004; Gaia (...)

11This “desire for Africa” happened both symbolically and in searching for sensorial experiences, reconnecting Fascist man with the epic deeds of the mythological ancestors of Imperial Rome. Or rather, this was the colonial propaganda model offered to the Italians. As pointed out by Barbara Spadaro: “sexuality is recognised as an essential field of observation for the asymmetrical differential constitution of gender, race, class, outside and within Europe”.12 Adopting a gaze on whiteness,13 it is possible to list and organise a genealogy of subjects who were classified in terms of colour, race, gender. In this sense, Gaia Giuliani writes this reflection on the fascist regime:

• 15 Carmine Conelli, Il rovescio della nazione. La costruzione coloniale dell’idea di Mezzogiorno, Napo (...)
• 16 Gaia Giuliani, Monica Di Barbora, Vincenza Perilli, Tatiana Petrovich Njegosh, Tavola Rotonda. Visu (...)
• 17 Gaia Giuliani, Il colore della nazione, Milano-Firenze, Le Monnier-Mondadori, 2015.

12This reasoning works when Italianness refers to the colonies or the colonial world (such as , Tunisia, Egypt, places of migration during the nineteenth century); in the case of Southern Italy as Carmine Conelli explained,15 the public narrative about the colour line identified not only black or brown subjects but also characteristics corresponding to African peoples (idle individuals, dedicated to deception, without morals, ambiguous and lascivious in behaviour). The Italian debate analysed these aspects from many perspectives: the racial narratives and construction of Italian beauty,16 and the visual representation from an intersectional point of view.17

• 18 Bianca Gaudenzi, Fascismi in vetrina. Pubblicità e modelli di consumo nel Ventennio e nel Terzo Rei (...)
• 19 Simone Cinotto, Gastrofascismo e impero. Il cibo nell’Africa Orientale Italiana, 1935-1941, Milano, (...)
• 20 Alfredo Mignemi, Immagine coordinata per un impero. Etiopia 1935-1936, Torino, Forma, 1983.
• 21 Ferdinando Fasce, Elisabetta Bini, Bianca Gaudenzi, Comprare per credere. La pubblicità italiana da (...)
• 22 See: Antonio Farchione, Storia della pubblicità italiana dall’Unità ai nostri giorni, Canterano, Ar (...)
• 23 Diana Garvin, Feeding fascism: the politics of women’s food work, Eugene, University of Oregon Pres (...)
• 24 Carol Helstosky, Garlic and oil: food and politics in Italy, Oxford, Berg Publishers, 2004.

13As regards the second research field, it is important to mention earlier historiographic literature on food advertising and fascism. Bianca Gaudenzi18 published a wonderful volume, in which she analyses forms of consumption in both the Italian and German regimes. In her book, only a small part is dedicated to colonialism. Simone Cinotto, in his Gastrofascism and Empire,19 dedicated a final part of the text to deconstructing some important food adverts during fascism. Other publications have dealt with the Italian colonial imaginary, also paying attention to food advertising.20 While Fernando Fasce, Elisabetta Bini and Bianca Gaudenzi21 have analysed the role of advertising in the history of Italy, the history of Italian advertising has been examined in different volumes.22 Most recently, Diana Garvin23 approached the study of fascism through the lens of food, paying attention to women in the Italian context; and, in another contribution, she highlighted the relationship between food and politics in Italy. Carol Helstosky24 investigated Italian food habits, examining the role of the fascist regime in shaping the Italian identity.

• 25 Karen Pinkus, Bodily Regimes: Italian Advertising under Fascism, Minneapolis, University of Minneso (...)
• 26 Ivi, 4.

14Karen Pinkus has written probably the most important book on Italian advertising during fascism.25 In her work, Pinkus scrutinised the narrative about the body under fascism in many advertisements, by mapping and analysing recurring visual representations. As she put it: “this project […] attempts neither a strict critique of fascist economic policies, nor an objective history of design styles, but a survey of corporal forms suspended somewhere between these two fields.”26

• 27 Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of culture, Oxon, Routledge, 2004 (first published 1994).

15At the intersection of the two research fields mentioned above, in a “third space” in the sense proposed by Homi Bhabha,27 numerous issues remain unexamined. For example, where did the visual language of food advertising under fascism come from? Is it solely the product of fascism, some Italian artistic currents (such as futurism) and artists such as Fortunato Depero. Or is it possible to trace a similar European way of telling, representing and consequently imagining other bodies, other lands and other tastes? Where ‘other’ has a myriad of meanings: colonial, black, not European, but also bizarre, strange, unrefined, intense and excessive tastes.

• 28 Cedric Robinson, On racial capitalism, black internationalism, and cultures of resistance, London, (...)
• 29 Simone Cinotto, ‘The world on a plate: Globalization and national cuisines’, Quaderni Storici, No.  (...)

17Racism—this is the hypothesis behind this article—spread and passed from mouth to mouth, from body to body, not by ideology, but by the link between emotions, sensations, perceptions and images. This is not to say that race has not been theorised—as indeed it was—through scientific disciplines (anthropology, criminology, sociology, biology, eugenics, etc.). Instead, the above statement means that there are widespread and shared memorial practices in the public space with detrimental effects on constructing Italians’ masculine imaginaries, organising their dreams and desires, defining the horrid and the sensual, the perverse and the erotic. Memorial practices developed and continued to exist after the end of colonialism through emotions and perceptions, tastes and smells, in the social construction of the masculine touch and gaze. The materialisation of racism through senses and sensations combines well with the role of race and capitalism in the evolution from the feudal order to produce a modern world system, as pointed out by Cedric Robinson.28 Modernity, in fact, is made by material aspects and tangible perceptions such as the taste of national cuisines—which, in Europe, was invented in the nineteenth century29—as well as, the use/adoption of spices and exotic fruits, the flavour of faraway lands.

• 30 Stuart Hall, ‘The West and the rest: discourse and power’, Essential writings: identity and diaspor (...)

19This contribution will not deal with all the topics mentioned above. Food advertising will be analysed through the discursive approach proposed by Stuart Hall.30 The deconstructive practice of visual sources will not be finalised solely to examine the representations of black bodies; its aim is to individuate and scrutinise desires and appetites, sensations and perceptions of various male subjectivities that were interested in regenerating themselves.

• 31 Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional memory: remembering the holocaust in the age of decolonization, (...)
• 32 See: Nicola Labanca, Oltremare. Storia dell’espansione coloniale italiana, Bologna, Il Mulino, 2002 (...)

21The online research for this essay was carried out per year, from 1922 to 1943, both in a qualitative and quantitative perspective. Every poster, advertisement and graphic advertising object was examined to find traces of the relationship between Italy and its colonies. This relationship has to be placed within a broader framework of race in Europe and its legacies31 and examined by taking into account how food ads show bodies wanted, desired and craved; specific obsessions and sexual paranoia of Italian masculinity for the overseas; peculiar forms of taste evoking racist and sexist imaginaries. The analysis revealed an unexpected result that has to be considered when formulating the role of memory and memory processes in shaping racist representations of food. If historiography considers 1922 as the year of Italy’s reconquest of Libya—or as Nicola Labanca rightly wrote “conquest”32—there is no trace of this war in the analysed sources.

• 33 Stuart Hall, 1992.
• 34 Ann McClintock, Imperial Leather. Race, gender, and sexuality in the colonial context, New York and (...)

26While the deconstruction of historical sources in the perspective of discourse analysis33 aims to shed light on power relations and their reasons from a racist perspective, the investigation seems to be limited to an empirical dimension that has no direct impact on the ‘real’ world. But imaginaries, ideas, representations, desires, fears and anxieties, as well as emotions, perceptions and tastes are all elements of the ‘real’ world. They define the context in which forms of power are exercised. On the other hand, it is also true that forms of power act from the perspective of self-affirmation through the above-mentioned elements. It is the case of the Pears’ soap campaign analysed by Ann McClintock, in which the whitening of a black and implicitly racialised chimney sweep reveals “the middle-class Victorian fascination with clean, white bodies and clean, white clothes stemmed not only from the rampant profiteering of the imperial economy but also from the realms of ritual and fetish.”34 As regards other advertisements for the domestication of Africa, McClintock explains:

• 36 Brian Griffith, ‘Bacchus among the Blackshirts: wine making, consumerism and identity in fascist It (...)
• 37 Sidney Mintz, Sweetness and power: the place of sugar in modern history, New York, Viking, 1985.
• 38 James Walvin, The Fruits of empire: exotic produce and British taste 1660–1800, New York, New York (...)

27At this point, the contribution will examine three typologies of advertisements: those for sweets, for chocolates and for drinks and spirits. The reason for this choice is with regard to the deep and different relationships between each category mentioned before with the colony. Each of them has its own historical geography: sweets and chocolate evoke the white conquest of Americas, slavery in plantations and the triangulation between Europe, Africa and Americas; alcoholic and non-alcoholic drinks are directly connected to a male food habit because of the Italian and regime morality, as pointed out by Brian Griffith.36 In addition, all of them may be considered part of those drug foods mentioned by Sidney Mintz37 and James Walvin.38

• 39 Mintz 1985.

28These advertisements focused on sweets, which are non-essential foods usually enjoyed outside the time set aside for daily meals and in a moment of relaxation or leisure. In this sense, sweets evoke the taste of privilege, as in the case of sugar. Sidney Mintz39 highlighted how the product of plantations in the Americas was directly linked to power: both in terms of lifestyle and the ways in which European superiority was represented. Since the beginning of the seventeenth century, higher classes had consumed sugar as a symbolic expression of the embodiment of all the qualities of the newly discovered and conquered lands. Clearly, once again, when one says higher classes one means mainly men and some queens or women in power circles which were managed by men. For this reason, it can be said that the historian’s gaze might observe behind each sweet, given that it was made of sugar, a double dynamic that linked the production of whiteness through the ongoing re-invention of the black body. Rather than simply describing characters of topoi in ads, this approach aims to illuminate the prism through which this racialisation of black bodies was constantly re-invented, taking into account the different positionalities of consumers, companies and products.

• 40 Karen Pinkus, Bodily regimes: Italian advertising under fascism, Minneapolis, University of Minneso (...)

33The chant could be addressed only to the woman, the faccetta nera of Ethiopia, because it is through her that the “new” law and the “new” sexual economy will be enacted. The replacement of a “feudal” order with a new system of sexual vassalage (the themes of liberation and binding) make sense only in an environment where white male displaces black male so nearly that the laws themselves are in fact unchanged. The institutional structures will remain intact: only a new group of individuals will come to fill the positions. “Faccetta nera” brand chocolates are complicitous in this scheme of displacement and conquest.”40

• 41 See: Silke Hackernesch, Chocolate and blackness: a cultural history, Berlin, Campus Verlag Gmbh, 20 (...)

34Chocolate is another food advertised in racist narratives. First, it is important to point out that the racialised ways of advertising this product were not restricted to the Italians. As analysed by many scholars in relation to different colonialisms, chocolate was directly linked to the European public imaginary about black skin and the overseas.41

• 42 See Luisa Passerini, La fontana della giovinezza, Firenze, Giunti Editore, 1999.

39Tamarindo, mineral water, karkade (hibiscus), coffee, orangeade, alcoholic beverages and spirits: these drinks are advertised with black characters. From a cultural perspective, the idea of drinking ‘the otherness’—the wildness of a pre-modern world and the exoticism of a particular geographical region—is a reinterpretation of the myth of the fountain of youth.42 This myth reappeared in the Americas, in lands untouched and unknown by European men. Before the invasion of the continent, this myth took the form of another magical place from which one could drink to attain eternal youth or substance in infinite abundance, the Holy Grail. With the rise of colonialism in Africa, this imaginary was revisited in a new context: on the one hand, the rush to discover the sources of the Nile attracted many explorers and geographers such as Richard Burton, John Hanning Speke and Giovanni Miani. The source of the Nile was shrouded in mystery and in some European tales it began to be spoken of as a place offering access to eternal paradise.

• 43 Ambe is an Amharic and Tigrinya term used to describe a characteristic landform in Ethiopia.

43The Rum Coruba poster, which was launched in 1935, shows three black men with yellow sombreros (figure 24). Their faces are once again stereotypical and the depictions of the black men are racial: a large mouth and very red lips, in contrast to the black skin and very white teeth. Two yellow earrings once again evoke the topos of the pre-modern and uncivilised Africa. In this case, however, rum is a drink that originates from the Caribbean or at least where sugar cane is grown. However, in 1935, the character depicted recalled the Ethiopian war. It is obviously a short circuit that brings together different times and conditions of black peoples. Conversely, Calissano advertises its tonic wine with the aromas of Ethiopia, as is written in red in the foreground, on the poster created by designer Aurelio Craffonara in 1936 (figure 25). The picture shows the landscape of the new Italian colony, with a camel and an Italian soldier; in the background, one can see the ‘ambe’43 landscape. This last detail is interesting: the visual format of the panorama, which was usually used in colonial propaganda, aims to reflect the colonial flavour of the conquered territory in the wine produced.

• 44 Fernando Cordova, Il consenso imperfetto: quattro capitoli sul fascismo, Soveria Mannelli, Rubettin (...)

47The reappearance and repetition of some colonial topoi, such as red lips, black skin and white teeth (San Giorgio, Leone, Ramazzotti, Rum Coruba, Moretto, San Pellegrino); hypersexualised black women’s bodies (Ramazzotti, Moretto, Perugina, San Giorgio) is a theme that opens a reflection on the nexus between fascist propaganda and consensus.44 The advertisements analysed refer to private companies: they reproduced certain narratives or styles and precise visual representations because those who devised them assumed that they were well established in the public sphere, understandable and useful for the selling of foods and beverages. This topic can be the subject of further analysis in the field of research. For example, is it possible that all companies allied themselves with fascist propaganda? Or is it possible to suggest that the regime’s narrative tried to partially adopt a colonial visual culture and employ it in order to improve public support for the propaganda? Another possible interpretation leads us to individual designers, their relations with the regime and a European way of advertising certain products (chocolate, beverages, coffee, spirits, tea, etc.) and visualising ideas of exoticism, orientalism and colonialism.

• 45 Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper, Empires in world history: power and the politics of difference, (...)

48As for the use of black bodies, what has been analysed is consistent with what happened in other colonial nations such as France, England, Belgium and Holland. This consideration can be interpreted from the point of view of the circulation of certain images and visual representations between colonial nations as well as models of subjectification and forms of citizenship. Another possible interpretation is given by the approach to the study of mobility amongst empires. In particular, the focussing of the senses may suggest a circulation of some shared perceptions of the overseas. The choice of specific characters, certain themes and stereotypical representations for food advertisements are aimed at evoking a different sensoriality, in which race and gender combine in multiple ways to define exotic and oriental tastes in opposition to the usual national ones. If colonialism is an act of conquering a people, a region or a country, imperialism can be said to have added meanings to national identity. It is possible to consider this potential research path in order to analyse the role of imperialism in transforming and reshaping senses. The trans-imperial paradigm, on which an important debate is developing.45 could provide important suggestions and considerations for the Italian case study.

• 46 West African troops who fought for France in World War I.

49Taking into account the possible interpretations proposed above, the use of black bodies in advertising should be analysed both from a European and a transnational perspective. In the case of Italy, the early advertisements of the 1920s (Pastiglie Leone, Unica, Perugina, etc.) refer to narrative and visual models that seem to have been imported from other countries. One example of this is the advertising of Banania in France at the beginning of the twentieth century (figure 28). The history of Banania, in turn, is emblematic of a very broad colonial horizon which it stretches from Nicaragua, where the journalist Pierre Lardet discovered the recipe in 1909, to Senegal under French rule, with France being the symbolic realm and place of origin of the characters depicted in the French company’s racist advertisements. With this gaze it will be possible to analyse many thematic connections between images and meanings in each empire: female black body/colonial land, chocolate/black skin, alcohol/colonial sexuality, coffee/colonial exoticism, beverages/youth and virility. One can take the case of the aforementioned Banania and banana Perugina: same ingredients (chocolate and banana), different representations both targeting the idea of virility (a black man hugging a banana and a Senegalese tirailleur46), a similar taste referencing different colonies (the Horn of Africa for Italy and Madagascar for France).

• 47 See Kayla Wazala Tompkins, Racial indigestion: eating bodies in the 19^th century, New York, New Yor (...)

50Visual representations must not be disconnected from the determination of taste, nor from the idea of a European social metabolism that covets, symbolically eats and then equally metaphorically digests the colonial world. Kayla Wazana Tompkins47 wrote important pages on the role of European domination in transforming and utilising the rest of the world. Although the above arguments deserve their own space, I think it is also important to show that the ways in which race, gender and sexuality interact in defining the topoi presented above should be interpreted precisely in terms of the formation of specific tastes. In many advertisements, like those by Ramazzotti, Moretto and Perugina, the reference to proximity and thus to touch and sexuality is evident: that is to say, the power relationship in which bodies appear as representations, but also including the role they play in relation to white Italian bodies. In the same way, the idea of a European social metabolism that behaves like a stomach in relation to the colonies is not exclusively a metaphorical allusion: rather, it means considering that forms of racism and sexism were also developed and rooted through consumption, and not solely in colonial and imperial political decisions in which the senses were the place of connection between mentality and practice, propaganda and consumption.