Gastrofascism and Empire: Food in Italian East Africa, 1935-1941

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Food stood at the centre of Mussolinis attempt to occupy Ethiopia and build an Italian Empire in East Africa. Seeking to redirect the surplus of Italian rural labor from migration overseas to its own Empire, the fascist regime envisioned transforming Ethiopia into Italys granary to establish self-sufficiency, demographic expansion and strengthen Italys international political position. While these plans failed, the extensive food exchanges and culinary hybridizations between Ethiopian and Italian food cultures thrived, and resulted in the creation of an Ethiopian-Italian cuisine, a taste of Empire at the margins.

In studying food in short-lived Italian East Africa, Gastrofascism and Empire breaks significant new ground in our understanding of the workings of empire in the circulation of bodies, foodways, and global practices of dependence and colonialism, as well as the decolonizing practices of indigenous food and African anticolonial resistance. In East Africa, Fascist Italy brought older imperial models of global food to a hypermodern level in all its political, technoscientific, environmental, and nutritional aspects. This larger story of food sovereigntyentered in racist, mass settler colonialismis dramatically different from the plantation and trade colonialisms of other empires and has never been comprehensively told.

Using an original decolonizing food studies approach and an unprecedented variety of unexplored Ethiopian and Italian sources, Cinotto describes the different meanings of different foods for different people at different points of the imperial food chain. Exploring the subjectivities, agencies and emotions of Ethiopian and Italian men and women, it goes beyond simple colonizer/colonized binaries and offers a nuanced picture of lived, multisensorial experiences with food and empire.

Reviews

In this important book, Simone Cinotto portrays the intertwined gastronomic and racial fears and fantasies that inspired fascist Italys empire in Ethiopia. Despite attempts to segregate European and African foods and bodies, an ideal shared by contemporary nationalist politicians, a hybrid Italian-Ethiopian cuisine lives on in both countries. - Jeffrey Pilcher, Professor of Food Studies, University of Toronto, Canada
Gastrofascism and Empire is a brilliant and biting analysis of Fascist Italys bioimperialism and Italian East Africas resistance to the empire of food. Deconstructing one model of colonial gastronomy, Cinotto maps out the movement of people, practices of taste and disgust, and an indigenous attempt at food sovereignty. A new model in fascist studies. - Stanislao Pugliese, Professor of History, Hofstra University, USA
A compelling examination of the connections between food and Italian Fascist imperialism. Simone Cinotto offers a new lens on the history of occupied East Africa. He examines the devastating impact of Italian imperialism on East African food security, and how Fascist ideologies and practices of racism and autarchy influenced food politics. An original and welcome study. - Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Professor of History and Italian Studies, New York University, USA

Author Bio

Simone Cinotto is Associate Professor of Contemporary History at the University of Gastronomic Sciences of Pollenzo, Italy. He was Visiting Professor at Indiana University, USA from 2017-2018 and at SOAS, University of London, UK from 2014-2019. He is the author of several books including The Italian American Table: Food, Family, and Community in New York City (2013) and with Daniel Bender, Food Mobilities: Making World Cuisines (2023).