Italian fascist exhibitions and Ezra Pound's move to the imperial

Twentieth Century Literature, Spring, 2005 by Catherine E. Paul

     combined old-fashioned savageries (decapitations, castrations, and
     burning and razing of civilian quarters) with industrial killing
     methods (aerial gas bombings and efficient open-grave executions)
     that are more commonly associated with Hitler and Stalin's soldiers
     than with Mussolini's rank and file [...] was so out of keeping
     with Italians' self-perception as the more "humane" dictatorship
     that it has been edited out of popular and official memory. Until
     1995, the Italian government, and former combatants such as Indro
     Montanelli, denied the use of gas in East Africa. (126)

But this denial of the reality of colonized others is hardly limited to Italy's colonial conquests, as Fredric Jameson has suggested. Instead, it is part of a larger "strategy of representational containment" characteristic of this period of imperial literature. He suggests that during the period from the late nineteenth century through the Second World War or so, the "radical otherness of colonized, non-Western peoples" is systematically made invisible in favor of "others" rooted in other imperial nation-states (48-50).

Indeed, Guide to Kulchur follows this trend. Although Pound's Guide demonstrates a pervasive concern with empires (Roman, Macedonian, British), noting their rises and falls and what they offer civilization, its discussion is deeply rooted in the metropolis. His writing about the condition of the British empire may be shaped partly by the fact that by this time, Mussolini's commentary on Britain had soured, emphasizing its limitations rather than strengths. (24) Pound's analysis follows suit: he comments in Guide to Kulchur that

     Never in all my 12 years in Gomorrah on Thames did I find any
     Englishman who knew anything, save those who had come back from the
     edges of Empire where the effect of the central decay was showing,
     where the strain of the great lies and rascalities were beginning
     to tell. (228)

And even in such passages where he makes reference to the colonial situation at "the edges of Empire," it is a returning Englishman whose opinion he repeats. In so representing the British Empire, he is replacing the colonized other with what Jameson calls the "Imperial type," the Englishman who has benefited from the imperial conquest and whose views stand in for the reality of the colonial situation (57-58). At the same time, Pound's sense that the empire's condition is more visible at its peripheries than in its metropolis reflects the complexity of his own geographical position, in remote Rapallo rather than urban Rome, engaged nonetheless in the cultural work of the empire. That so much of Pound's thinking about empire comes in a chapter of the Guide titled "Losses" indicates his anxiety that falls of empires bring a loss of culture: the Italian empire, by extension, must thrive so that its cultural programming educates those who need it. To counteract loss of cultural heritage--not in Italy, where work is already underway to recover it, but in the United States and Britain, where people have not understood this loss--he uses fascist methods to bring his vision of culture to a decadent populace.