Abstract
From the 1920s through the early 1940s, under Fascist Party leadership, Italian national policy grounded itself in autarchia: a drive for self-sufficiency spanning national economy to home economics. To date, scholarly attention to autarky’s influence on agriculture, culinary practice, and national diet has centred almost exclusively on the Battaglia del Grano—the Battle for Grain. More slippery has been the concurrent effort to produce an Italian banana. Developed within the Istituto Agricolo Coloniale, imported under the monopoly of the Regio Azienda Monopolio Banane, and supported by campaigns to reshape dietary habits, the banana—a clone crop originating in Southeast Asia—was reclassified as unique, if not native to the nation’s ‘four shores’. In this paper, I map the history of the Italian banana from Fascist era to the present day. Charting the fruit’s path from laboratory to colonial plantation to metropolitan marketplace, I show how agriculture, commerce, and consumption reflected and reinforced debates over sovereignty, self-sufficiency, and belonging. Juxtaposing Fascist-era discourse with contemporary political rhetoric, and historical education slogans with modern banana advertising, I argue that the ‘fascist banana’ anticipates current dialogue on sustainability, food sovereignty, self-sufficiency, and the meaning of ‘homegrown’ in a world increasingly structured by global supply chains. Above all, I propose that la banana italiana exemplifies how food, by virtue of its simultaneously mundane and essential role in daily life, becomes vehicle of what Michael Billig has termed ‘banal nationalism;’ shaping collective imaginations of territory, identity, and the authentic body.
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
Self-sufficiency, Food Sovereignty, Political Economy, Local Foods, Fascism, Food Engineering
