Expanding and Dominating Through Phonography: Fascist Italy and the Colonisation of East Africa

Between 1935 and the early 1940s, the recorded sound propaganda repertoire of the Italian Fascist regime was enriched by numerous records of songs about the conquest and occupation of Ethiopia, and subsequently, after the foundation of Italian East Africa and the Empire, by records of music and language lessons from the colonies. Today, these propaganda recordings constitute a sound archive that has recently been studied as part of a decolonial approach, noting its use to massively disseminate the racist conceptions and colonial policies of the Fascist regime. However, this initial research, focused on the music and lyrics of propaganda songs, lacks a theorization of the phonographic medium as a means of territorial expansion and occupation. Through its mastery of sound and its modernity, phonography made it possible to assert the colonist's civilizational identity, then to dominate, appropriate and even collect the cultural productions of the colonized populations. To carry out this theorizing, we propose to analyze graphic representations of sound devices that are significant to their colonial imagination. Then, by examining Fascist phonography, we will see how it participated, sometimes ambivalently, in the effort to colonize Africa and establish the short-lived Italian Empire.