Brilliantly and elegantly written, Restorations of Empire in Africa explores ‘how Roman discourses on Africa were appropriated and engaged with in the dominant cultures of imperial Italy’ (5). The book shows how surviving ancient Roman remains brought about renewed interest in the social, political and cultural aspects of Italian imperialism. Samuel Agbamu thoroughly reviews and engages with a variety of sources: Latin and Greek literature, archaeological material, public architecture, inscriptions and sculpture, films and political speeches. He analyses Italian nation-building and imperialist projects and their teleological connections with ancient Rome.
Ch. 1 links the early stages of Italy’s expansionism in Africa to the nineteenth-century movement for Italian unification that led to the 1861 establishment of the Kingdom of Italy. The erection in Rome of a monument to commemorate the 500 soldiers who died in a military expedition to Dogali, Ethiopia, in 1887 supports this connection. Chs 2 and 3 look at the politics of Italy in relation to Africa, particularly Libya. A. also considers two literary trends, the Futurism of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and the classicising modernism of Gabriele D’Annunzio, in the context of the development of a national-imperial culture between the defeat of Adwa (1896) and the invasion of Libya (1911). Ch. 4 is an exposition of the features of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century imperialistic Italy, involving ideologies of race, gender and the nation through film and cinematic sources in which the performativity of romanità is made palpable in A.’s descriptive analysis.
Ch. 5 deals with enunciations of Roman history on the African continent in documents such as the Codex Fori Mussolini that appeared during the twenty-year period of Fascism in Italy from 1922 to 1943. Ch. 6 critically examines the justification of the Italian invasion of Ethiopia through the improper appropriation of Greco-Roman antiquities by Mussolini, in which the invasion is portrayed as a continuation and re-enactment of Rome’s imperial mission in Africa — Italy’s ‘re-founding’ of Rome’s empire. Ch. 7 examines the film Scipione l’Africano by Carmine Gallone (1937). Ch. 8 discusses the Arco dei Fileni in Libya, inaugurated in 1937. Ch. 9 looks at aspects of the history of the Italian aspirations to empire, from the late 1930s to the 1950s. In Ch. 10, A. concludes his magnum opus by focusing on modern-day Italy, critically re-examining the roots of constructed memory via the concept of ‘Mare nostrum’.
As A. admits, projects of this nature pose the chief problem of ‘reproducing colonial discourses and perpetuating the silencing of the voices of the colonized and those dissenting from the dominant culture’ (8). To deal with this problem, A. does well to provide a post-colonial critique of the accoutrements and conundrums of Empire. He offers a post-colonial reaction to Italy’s idealistic (and fascist) imperialism, through which he explores Italy’s antiquated colonial model and its one-sided appropriation of romanità in its African colonies. Importantly, A. articulates the imperative for recognising the African as a subject of history whose existence and claim to the Mediterranean territory and the sea, historically and in contemporary times, is denied by Empire. Engaging with the ‘Mare Nostrum’ and ‘Barca Nostra’ concepts as post-colonial political terms, as I see it, in a context in which cultural studies regard post-colonialism as a cultural parallel to neo-colonialism, A. explores how these terms function as forms of colonialism in terms of a global cultural, economic and political system that makes use of both hard and soft power. A. approaches the colonial era also from the perspective of post-colonial thinking, through which Fascism may be perceived as having affected Italian attitudes towards Africa and the Mediterranean. A.’s attention to Roman imperialism and archaeology allows for a critical probing of the imperial past of the modern Italian state and gives his readers the opportunity to explore the nexus between Classics and post-colonial thinking in terms of the persistence and continuity of Empire as a ‘transtemporal’ concept.
While A.’s book is an admirable study of ‘Empire’, he does not pay much attention to some important and pioneering works in the study of Empire that provide useful concepts for thinking about an Empire and what influences it. Books like the bestselling Empire (2000) by Hardt and Negri have made theoretical and conceptual arguments relating to ‘modern sovereignty’ that a book on Empire studies should not overlook. This could have led to a nuanced view on the imposition of imperial boundaries that is aimed at guarding the purity of imperial identity, in A.’s descriptive analysis of Italy’s claims to territory in Africa and the Mediterranean. A.’s work has the primary aim of dealing with the ways that the texts and images of the imperial culture of ancient Rome were used and adapted by modern Italy; yet the reader also becomes aware of the book’s engagement with the idea of the ancient Roman empire, whose time and space is ‘reproduced’ by a web of imperial cultural, textual and material dissemination in Italy’s African projects (cf. I. Willis in L. Hardwick and J. I. Porter (eds), Classics in Post-Colonial Worlds (2007), 329–48).
In summary, my impression of this work is extremely positive. A.’s book eminently deserves the attention of classicists, historians ancient and modern, literary scholars, archaeologists, African and post-colonial scholars.
