Tag: Ethiopia

Gastrofascism and Empire: Food in Italian East Africa, 1935–1941

Simone Cinotto, University of Gastronomic Sciences Pollenzo

The Italian Fascist regime envisioned transforming Ethiopia into its own granary to establish self-sufficiency to encourage demographic expansion, and to strengthen Italy’s international political position. While these plans failed, the extensive food exchanges and culinary hybridizations between Ethiopian and Italian food cultures thrived, resulting in the creation of an Ethiopian-Italian cuisine, a taste of Empire at the margins. Using a decolonizing food-studies approach and unexplored Ethiopian and Italian sources, Simone Cinotto describes the meanings of different foods for different people at various points along the imperial food chain. Exploring the subjectivities, agencies, and emotions of Ethiopians and Italians, Gastrofascism and Empire (Bloomsbury, 2024) goes beyond simple colonizer/colonized binaries and offers a nuanced picture of lived, multisensorial experiences.

Oltre i bordi/Beyond the Frame (2023)

Thursday, December 7, 2023, 6pm

Oltre i bordi/Beyond the Frame (2023), 41 minutes
Simone Brioni and Matteo Sandrini, dirs.

Stony Brook University professor Simone Brioni has spent the past ten years researching Italian colonialism. On a return visit to Italy, he discovered a box of photographs taken in Italian East Africa (Eritrea and Ethiopia) in the 1930s by a distant relative who had been sent to document the colonial enterprise for the Fascist regime. This fortuitous discovery prompted considerations about the colonial gaze and its legacy. Though photography is often perceived by viewers as an unbiased documentation of historical events, in fact it provides a mediated interpretation of reality. In a narrative that interweaves personal reflections and collective history—shared by both colonizers and colonized—this film invites viewers to look “beyond the frame” of colonial photography. In Italian, with English subtitles.