Past-Modernism, or the Cultural Logic of High Fascism: Toward an Architecture of Italian Difference, 1936–1942

This article uses the category of difference—a critical tool used by post-structuralist, postmodernist, and postcolonial theorists—to interrogate Italian Fascist architecture of the late interwar period. I show how architecture for the 1942 Rome World’s Fair created an identitarian aesthetic that hybridized rectilinear facades of modernism with arches and columns of Roman antiquity. I argue this aesthetic represented Fascism’s resistance to the universalizing impulse of modern industrial society, which Fascists identified with modernist architecture. To counter, planners rendered “irreducible” cultural difference as Fascism’s standpoint of resistance to capitalism’s abstract and universal materializations. By designating the aesthetic “past-modernist,” this work underscores Fascism’s claim to simultaneously return to “ethno-cultural origins” and transcend modernism. Past-modernism, though, anticipates postmodernism. The conclusion considers past-modernism alongside recent theories that posit “cultural antecedents” as resistance to capitalism, arguing that Fascism’s claim of difference shows the limits of identitarian movements to realize freedom from domination.