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

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

     Now that the Empire exists, we must consider the relationship
     between center, periphery, and minor nuclei of the State. An
     Empire needs a Center in which the intelligence and the strength of
     the race are concentrated, but from which in turn the light of its
     civilization spreads across and penetrates the lesser nuclei. This
     diffusion depends not only on the undefined will of the lesser
     cities but also on their sensibility and perception. It is not
     enough to be sensitive to the passive reception of benefits alone;
     it is necessary to show ourselves ready to seize the opportunity
     for constructive work. (Pound and Music 393)

Still speaking of a return to Roman order, he traces the movement of ideas in an imperial context:

     The New Order will spread from Rome in ways neither understood nor
     dreamed of, in ways foreseen only by a few people who have an
     "ardent imagination," and it will spread not only "geographically"
     in space, but will also grow in depth of development and concept.

His plan for lesser cities follows the regime's vision for a new Roman empire. As Ruth Ben-Ghiat has shown, the fascist notion of the nation as an organic entity derived both from liberal-era ideas about national development and from the nationalist movement's approach to imagining state goals (17-18). As early as 1923, in an essay titled "The Italian Empire," F.T. Marinetti used analogies to the human body to imagine that an "Italian empire, because our slender peninsula--elegant backbone with a hard head of heavy and domineering Alps, epitome of all the beauties of the earth and bursting with creative genius--has the right to govern the world" (qtd. in Schnapp, Primer 277). And in 1928, Margherita Sarfatti, an early proponent of a new Italian empire with Rome as its heart, said that Benito Mussolini "is making Italy aware of its unity and moral greatness through her capital's architectural unity and material greatness" (qtd. in Schnapp, Primer 251). She acknowledged that such "centralization imposes painful sacrifices, defacements, and decapitations on the other cities of the 'Italic folk endowed with many lives.' But these are necessary and fruitful." Pound agrees: lesser cites are not rivals of Rome, but rather part of its organic whole:

     In the magnificent body of the Fascist state no one is excluded,
     but everyone must function according to his abilities, according to
     his imagination and perception.... Rome's power did not cease with
     the fall of the Empire of the Caesars, it was not the creation of
     Julius alone, its order was perpetuated in the action of Antonius,
     Constantine, and Justinian, and later with the canon law of the
     Middle Ages. (Pound and Music 393)

His organic image of the empire rests on fascism's corporate state, and his image of this body-state grows from the idea of empire in ancient Rome: ancient cultural heritage enables modern success.

Pound's description, like the imperialist propaganda of the time, replaces the reality of colonized bodies with a classicizing image of a Roman body of state. As Ben-Ghiat has shown, "the slaughter in Ethiopia," which