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Podcast: New Books in Italian Studies
Episode: Marco Armiero et al., "Mussolini's Nature: An Environmental History of Italian Fascism" (MIT Press, 2022)
Description: In this first environmental history of Italian fascism, Marco Armiero, Roberta Biasillo, and Wilko Graf von Hardenberg reveal that nature and fascist rhetoric are inextricable. Mussolini's Nature explores fascist political ecologies, or rather the practices and narratives through which the regime constructed imaginary and material ecologies functional to its political project. Mussolini's Nature: An Environmental History of Italian Fascism (MIT Press, 2022) does not pursue the ghost of a green Mussolini by counting how many national parks were created during the regime or how many trees planted. Instead, the reader is trained to recognize fascist political ecology in Mussolini's speeches, recl...