WEDS TALKS:Archaeological Photography and the Fascist Appropriation of Roman Libya

ABSTRACT: Roman archaeological materials performed a central position in Italian Fascist propaganda: Mussolini introduced his regime as an extension or rebirth of the Roman empire and sponsored main excavation and restoration tasks in and past Rome. Italian colonial archaeology in Libya prolonged this mission and archaeological stays had been positioned as Italian cultural heritage and mobilized to justify colonial occupation by drawing specific parallels between historical Roman and trendy Italian

enlargement. This speak examines the vital position pictures performed on this Fascist appropriation of the Roman previous in Libya; by tracing histories of the manufacturing, circulation, reception, and meeting into archives of such pictures, I argue that archaeological images weren’t merely documentary objects however fairly functioned aspolitical instruments which reworked Libya’s archaeological heritage into monumental symbols of Italian Fascism.

BIO: Taylor Carr-Howard is a Ph.D. candidate in Archaeology at UCLA. Her dissertation, “Archaeological Photographs and the (De)Colonial Imagination,” examines the position that archaeological pictures performed within the historical past of French and Italian colonial archaeology in North Africa and,drawing on this historical past,explores theways through which this photographic archivecan be used to decolonize the self-discipline of classical archaeology. Her analysis has been supported by the Archaeological Institute of America.