Grounds for Reclamation: Fascism and Postfascism in the Pontine Marshes

Fascism’s success in building communities and structures of conviviality was for many years avoided by the critical scholarship on Italian fascism. More recently, however, fascist land reclamation has become a favored topic in Italian historiographical revisionism: it has become an argument for the regime’s “revolutionary” aspects. This article argues that “land reclamation” was a fundamental policy and ideology of Italian fascism. It claims that reclamation furnishes the literal and figurative grounds of consent to the regime: this is to say, reclamation as policy and ideology was not only successful in creating consent but was a crucial site for its creation: reclamation was rooted in the idea of a politics and discourse that arise from the ground. This essay is an intervention into these debates: it argues that “land reclamation” is the tool used now by revisionist postfascist discourses in a new politics of memory.