The core of Asmara, Italy’s former colonial capital in Eritrea, is widely known as a unique repository of 1930s Italian architecture. In addition, its Italian food and other traces of the colonial era lend it the semblance, to foreign eyes, of a still-colonial city. This article describes this apparent colonial inertia with respect to Eritrean citizens’ and government’s interests in sustaining the illusion, and argues that they use their past as Italian colonial subjects – specifically, their postcolonial cultural capital - to fortify their sense of separateness from Ethiopians, and celebrate their independence from their African neighbor.

Since the founding of the Italian nation in 1861, mass emigration has played a crucial role in the construction of a national identity among a population historically divided by regional, ethnic, linguistic and cultural differences. In the aftermath of the Second World War, emigration continued to fulfill a vital function in Italy's national redefinition. In material terms, it enabled Italy to rebuild a devastated political and economic framework in a manner that allowed old power blocs to evade the restructuring of traditional relations of production.

Yet emigration proved equally essential for redrawing the cognitive map of the nation, laying out the new ideological terrain upon which material reconstruction was to take place. In the ideological vacuum that followed the collapse of Fascism and the nation's loss of foreign colonies, postwar emigration narratives proved fundamental for carrying out a project of collective redemption that cleansed Italians from the stain of Fascism while restoring the colonial imaginary that had traditionally governed the nation's relationship with its South. By supplying at once absolution for past sins and an archaic internal Other against which the new nation could measure itself, postwar representations of emigration helped pave the way for Italy's transformation into a "modern," post-Fascist democracy, a founder of the European Union, and one of the world's leading economies.

This dissertation examines emigration narratives produced in literary and filmic texts spanning from 1945 to 1964 in works by key figures of Italian postwar culture such as Carlo Levi, Ignazio Silone, Rocco Scotellaro, Mario Soldati, Aldo Fabrizi, Luchino Visconti, and Pier Paolo Pasolini. By examining shifting forms of interdiction that placed migrant Others outside the moral, spatial and temporal boundaries of the nation, this research aims to illustrate how the emigrants' textual presence gave shape and meaning to the new nation, bringing into focus the contours of a new republic emerging from the ashes of Fascism.

In this dissertation I contextualize the political protagonism of Silvio Berlusconi with respect to important heroes of contemporary Italian popular culture. Comparing Berlusconi to the protagonists of Italy's dramatized television series and TV-movies, I consider the political and pop cultural significance of his behavior through Antonio Gramsci's theories of hegemony and the national popular. I locate Berlusconi's political connection to contemporary Italian popular culture by briefly contrasting it to past iterations of the politics-popular culture relationship in Italy and the United States, and to its likely future configurations in Italy.

My research shows that while Berlusconi is often a potent and educative symbol of a hegemonic, conservative national popular culture, he is also often at odds with important components of said culture. This finding adds nuance to most contemporary considerations of Berlusconi's power, which frequently posit his political and cultural influence as monolithic. Increasing social and cultural fragmentation in Italy suggests that the "Berlusconis" of the future will likewise embody a charismatic and spectacular form of politics, though they will be bereft of Berlusconi's wider political-cultural syncing, which, while never perfect, has nevertheless been the historically most significant facet of his influence.

Histories of Fascist-era architecture in Italy have traditionally focused on the connections between architectural theory and political discourse. Most of these studies emphasize the use of political language in architectural writings, and many are limited to the symbolic imperial center: the capital city of Rome. This dissertation differs in its approach by examining the period’s architectural production through an economic rather than conceptual lens. The study is premised on the notion that the Fascist effort to redesign Italian society was not a strictly ideological process. Instead, it posits that practical financial considerations played a significant role in the regime’s architectural interventions. Put simply, the regime needed money to achieve its political aims—in particular when those aims involved the destruction and construction of Italy’s built environment. To this end, the government relied on elite financing, cheap labor, and broad economic restructuring to incentivize commercial activity and to support struggling domestic industries. Importantly, the web of Fascist economic policy, industrialism, and modernist architecture converged in Northern Italy. While Rome served as the functional and symbolic center of the Italian government, it lacked the economic strength of Italy’s North. Turin, in particular, was home to some of the nation’s most powerful financial elites who both lobbied for pro-business policies and funded the regime’s construction projects. The reconstruction of Via Roma, the central commercial street in Turin, is the focus of this study, as it is a prime example of the ways in which the regime’s economic maneuvering influenced its architectural interventions. The new Via Roma was the regime’s most significant construction project in Turin, taking roughly a decade to complete. The period of the road’s reconstruction—from roughly 1931 to 1938—overlapped with the period of economic fascistizzazione in which the regime attempted to gain control of the national economy. Central to this study, therefore, are the Fascist government’s two primary economic programs of corporatism—a foundational concept in Fascism’s economic platform—and autarky—adopted explicitly in the late 1930s. Corporatism was proposed as an autonomous system for the regulation of capital and labor, while autarky emphasized war-readiness and self-sufficiency. The regime embraced these two systems as complementary programs for the expansion of state controls over the Italian economy. This dissertation shows that the regime’s attempts to merge these two economic systems resulted in significant aesthetic changes in Turin’s built environment. The regime’s efforts to navigate existing financial systems while also attempting to revolutionize Italy’s economy resulted in a scarcity of national bank reserves, a trend towards industrial monopolization, widespread unemployment, austerity measures for the working classes, and an increasingly elaborate welfare system. In the case of Turin’s Via Roma, these conditions brought about changes in architectural patronage, labor demands, material availability, and of course, design. Over the years of the street’s renewal, Fascist officials approved the construction of various buildings in different styles: first an array of neo-baroque palazzi, followed by a modernist steel-frame skyscraper, and finally, a master-planned collection of austere stile littorio buildings, examined in Chapter Two, Chapter Three, and Chapter Four, respectively. The result was a mix of distinct architectural styles, each linked to a key moment in the regime’s economic history. By drawing connections between architectural design trends and economic policy, this dissertation presents a new way of framing the longstanding question of the regime’s aesthetic shift from openness to uniformity. In short, this study explores Italian Fascism not merely in terms of political doctrine, but also as an economic reality—through the physical construction of the Fascist state.

This dissertation examines cults of personality from the perspective of cognitive linguistics. Focusing on the cults of Benito Mussolini of Fascist Italy (in power 1922-1943) and Nicolae Ceauşescu of communist Romania (in power 1965-1989), it offers a novel framework for understanding and accounting for longstanding observations regarding such cults’ expressly communicative nature (see e.g. Wedeen 1999; Leese 2007; Márquez 2020; Postoutenko 2022) grounded in an adaptation of Construction Grammar (Goldberg 1995, 2006, 2019; Hoffmann & Trousdale 2013). At its core, Construction Grammar views the entirety of language to be made up of constructions, which are understood as “conventionalized pairings of form and function” that are stored and organized in an interrelated, hierarchical, mental ‘constructional’ network (Goldberg 2006: 1). Although originally devised specifically with human language in mind, Construction Grammar has recently been applied to broader swaths of communication and semiosis beyond language ‘proper’ such as co-speech gesture, image-text configurations, and other patterns that highlight the frequently multimodal nature of human interaction (see e.g. Steen & Turner 2013; Dancygier & Vandelanotte 2017a; Hoffmann 2017b, 2021; Zima & Bergs 2017a,b; Turner 2020, 2022). Aligning itself with such recent extensions, this dissertation considers cultic production (e.g. various conceptually-structured and materially-manifested representations of both Mussolini and Ceauşescu) to constitute cultic constructions that, although operating across communicative modalities, nevertheless often take shape visually in the form of images. To this end, this study explores the possibility of expanding the constructionist enterprise to include not only linguistic or multimodal but also specifically visual constructions into its theoretical apparatus.Within the present approach, such constructions are taken as the basis for all cultic semiosis and communicativity, which are here analyzed and accounted for across a range of artifacts relating to Mussolini’s and Ceauşescu’s cults – referred to here as ‘cult constructs’ – that encompass many different ‘kinds’ of cult production: official, regime-sanctioned or -produced constructs (e.g. monuments, official photographs, portraits, posters, etc.), unofficial, subversive constructs (e.g. jokes, caricatures, parodies, and ironies at the leaders’ expense), and also constructs that evince the ‘afterlives’ of both leaders’ cults (i.e. representations that appear today or have appeared in recent years, long after both cults have ceased to dominate public discourse). In this way, and in line with fundamental Construction Grammar principles, it presents a usage-based approach to cult structuration, organization, and manifestation in which cultic communication emerges dynamically both ‘from above’ and ‘from below,’ as well as in their interaction and even once the cult itself has ceased to officially ‘operate.’ Various themes central to cult communicativity are explored across this dissertation’s seven chapters. The first two chapters serve as introductions and overviews, with Chapter 1 addressing cults of personality and their communicative dimensions (as well as providing an introduction to the study as a whole) and Chapter 2 supplying a concise overview of key terms, theories, and ideas from cognitive linguistics that are deployed throughout the subsequent chapters. Chapters 3-5 then present cognitive-linguistic and constructionist analyses of particularly salient aspects of Mussolini’s and Ceauşescu’s cults, including the emergence of the multifaceted, polysemous image of both leaders within their respective cult networks (Chapter 3), the pivotal role that conceptual metonymy plays in their cults’ structuration (Chapter 4), and the peculiar manipulation and appropriation of past, present, and future time into both of their cults (Chapter 5). Throughout these chapters, various cultic constructions are posited and explained based on a range of presented (predominantly) visual data, which are often discussed and compared between the two cult contexts in question. While each of the cult constructs analyzed in Chapters 3-5 constitutes a representation of Mussolini or Ceauşescu largely disseminated ‘from above,’ Chapter 6 then highlights the dialogic nature of cult communicativity and analyzes the subversive reappropriation and redeployment of these representations ‘from below’ as instances of creative conceptual transference based in particular cultic constructions (e.g. Mussolini’s Caesarian pretensions, Ceauşescu’s so-called Epocă de Aur ‘golden age’). These redeployments are taken as evidence that, even if one might not ‘believe’ in the content of a particular cultic representation (e.g. Mussolini’s exceptional virility or Ceauşescu’s avowed ordinariness), they are still entrenched in individuals’ minds and socially conventionalized by virtue of their frequent dissemination-cum-exposure so as to (come to) constitute particular, cult-specific constructions. Such reproductions, it is argued, in taking a semantically adulating form and recasting (or, in the present framework, reblending) it as a subversive one (while still largely maintaining that same form), demonstrate the remarkable constructional polysemy that characterizes the semantic structure of personality cults as a form of what I refer to as multimodal-yet-hypervisual ‘authoritative discourse’ (Bakhtin 1994). Chapter 7 then concludes with a consideration of the two cults’ afterlives both in the immediate aftermaths of their respective leaders’ falls from power and in their continued vitality in the present day, opening up questions each into cultic communication, emergence, and evolution, into methods for researching visual and multimodal communication within cognitive linguistics at large, and into the nature of possible ‘visual constructions’ and what they might entail. Finally, it should be noted that this project in its totality presents a fundamentally interdisciplinary approach to the study not only of personality cult phenomena, production, and communication but also of broader forms of visual and multimodal semiosis. That is, while the principal framework of examination is supplied by cognitive linguistics (and related disciplines such as cognitive science, psychology, and philosophy), this dissertation and its approach also draw heavily on findings and theories from anthropology, visual culture, political science, literary theory, and history. Consequently, alongside hallmark cognitive-linguistic theories such as Construction Grammar, Frame Semantics (see e.g. Fillmore 1982, 1985), Conceptual Blending Theory (see e.g. Fauconnier & Turner 2002; Turner 2014), and Conceptual Metonymy Theory (see e.g. Kövecses & Radden 1998; Barcelona, Pannain & Blanco-Carrión 2018), several other important contributions to language, communication, and semiotics such as performativity (Austin 1962), citationality (Derrida 1988), and Bakhtin’s aforementioned ‘authoritative discourse’ – and many studies that have followed in their wakes – are brought in to enrich, complement, and nuance the ‘cognitive-universal’ side of things (e.g. perception, memory, salience, usage and frequency effects, semantic frames, conceptual entrenchment, etc.) with the ‘culture-specific’ side (e.g. historical or ideological particularities, political and societal structures, various [visual-]cultural considerations, questions of media and reproduction, etc.). It is argued throughout that this kind of blended theoretical approach is essential for capturing the full potential and extent of personality cult communicativity.

The word convivenza is used to describe peaceful ‘co-existence’ between diverse communities, particularly religious communities. The idea that convivenza is central to Sicilian identity has become commonplace in local discourse, and is often used to distinguish the island from mainland Italy and Europe. “Every Sicilian has Arab DNA,” I am often told during research in Sicily, “because Sicily was once an Islamic Emirate.” “While Jews were being persecuted in central Europe,” some argue, “they thrived in Sicily for centuries.” This narrative is neither new nor universally accepted – it is based on contested interpretations of Sicily’s past and present – but has acquired additional meanings in the twenty-first century, with Sicily now a point of arrival for migrants crossing the Mediterranean. Whereas numerous scholars have analyzed the contemporary effects of Américo Castro’s famous convivencia thesis in Spain (1948), the construction of a similar narrative in Sicily merits closer attention than it has thus far received. I focus on Palermo, Sicily’s regional capital, where this narrative is especially influential. I blend cultural studies and ethnography, both in-person and digital, to study the cultural memory of Palermo’s Jewish and Islamic past; its contemporary repercussions for the heritage sphere, and for the city’s religious landscape; and the role of the convivenza narrative in political rhetoric.

I first ask how the convivenza narrative encourages ‘rediscoveries’ of Palermo’s multi-religious heritage. I study how Palermo’s Jewish history has been emphasized in the past twenty years, over half a millennium after Sicily’s Jews were expelled in the late fifteenth century. I examine the emergence of Jewish ‘sites of memory’ in Palermo, including a medieval Jewish quarter; a pool that some believe was once a miqweh (ritual bath); and a former inquisitorial prison. I then turn my attention to two mosques and a planned future synagogue in Palermo, all located in former churches, arguing that heritage-based narratives are used to weave these into the contemporary city’s fabric. Finally, I analyze political messaging by one of the most vocal proponents of a ‘cosmopolitan’ Sicilian identity: Leoluca Orlando, Mayor of Palermo until 2022. I evaluate how Orlando uses history-based rhetoric to make pro-immigration arguments, framing Mediterranean ‘hospitality’ as an inherently Sicilian value. I build on studies of nostalgia, heritage, and cultural memory, critically examining the construction of a ‘cosmopolitan’ Mediterranean identity. I analyze how the stereotyped image of Sicily as ‘not quite European’ – once used within Italy to disparage Sicilians – is being celebrated by some in the twenty-first century, particularly by those who look at Italy’s anti-immigrant central government with trepidation.