Manuela Consonni - Böcker

Three Faces of Antifascism: Narrative of Resistance in Post-War Italian Political Culture tells the story of intertwining of Italian history, the anti-fascist paradigm and the memory of the Resistance and the Shoah. It is in this context that the post-war Jewish world took on a leading role in the victory over Nazism and in the construction of democracy in Italy. The book explores three main themes: the political history of Italy; the memory of the Resistance and fascism; and the memory of political deportation and the extermination of the Jews, making it an essential read for historians, scholars of Italian history, Holocaust studies, and anyone interested in the intersection of memory, politics, and social justice.

The starting point for this compilation is the wish to rethink the concept of antisemitism, race and gender in light of Sartre’s pioneering Réflexions sur la Question Juive seventy years after its publication. The book gathers texts by prestigious scholars from different disciplines in the Humanities and the Social Sciences, with the objective or revisiting this work locating it within the setting of two other pioneering – and we argue, related – publications, namely Simone De Beauvoir’s Le deuxième sexe of 1949 and Franz Fanon’s Peau noire et masques blancs of 1952. This particular and original standpoint sheds new light on the different meanings and political functions of the concept of antisemitism in a political and historical context marked by the post-modern concepts of multi-ethnicity and multiculturalism.