Renaissance, Humanism, and longue durée Fascism: Political meditations on Petrarch's Africa (1337)

Maurizio Meloni (Deakin University )

Fascism is an Italian invention, and something that, as the story proves these days too, never left the country. I argue in this talk that 20th c Italian Fascism has a much longer legacy and roots in the history of Italian ethnic nationalism, with its colonial history, racism, anti-Arabism, antisemitism, all phenomena that way predate the history of Italy as a modern nation (ca. 1860). While Rome's imperialism is an obvious source for this story, I focus here on the forgotten epic poem Africa, in Latin exametres,  that gave Francesco Petrarca his title of Poet Laureate (1341) and made him the founding father of Italian Humanism. I situate Petrarch's nine book poem on the Second Punic War (ca. 200 BCE) within the exclusionary processes, ethnic cleansing and proto-colonialism of fourteenth century Christian Europe, with a particular focus on the persecution of Arabic minorities, and de-arabization of European medicine and philosophy.

Maurizio Meloni is Associate professor in sociology at Deakin.

Zoom link available on request to Sean Bowden ([email protected])