Daly, Selena;
(2023)
Dealing with the Material Legacies of Italian Fascist Colonialism in Post-Communist Tirana.
Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies
10.1080/1369801X.2023.2222101.
(In press).
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Abstract
Albania was Italy’s most short-lived colony, under official fascist control only from the Italian invasion in 1939 until the collapse of Mussolini’s regime in 1943. However, although the fascist occupation was brief, there had been a significant Italian involvement in Albania since 1923. Thus, the influence of Fascism on Albania and especially on the capital city of Tirana was immense, not least in the areas of urban planning and architecture, most of which was retained intact by the Communist dictatorship which ruled from 1944 to 1990. This essay investigates the afterlives of this fascist-era architecture in post-Communist Tirana. In the panoply of Italy’s imperial territories, Albania was unique in passing from a fascist dictatorship to a Communist one and this trajectory provides important nuance to the current debates regarding the legacies of fascist heritage in the 75 years since the regime’s fall and especially in the twenty-first century. This essay pays particular attention to the years 2016–2020 during which two notable examples of fascist-era architecture in Tirana, namely the city’s football stadium and the National Theatre, have been at the centre of major political and public debates about the future of the city, the country and its governance, asking what these recent cases can reveal about the memory of fascist imperialism in post-Communist, democratic Albania and contributing to ongoing debates about the management, treatment and reception of the material legacies of Italian colonialism more broadly.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | Dealing with the Material Legacies of Italian Fascist Colonialism in Post-Communist Tirana |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.1080/1369801X.2023.2222101 |
| Publisher version: | https://doi.org/10.1080/1369801X.2023.2222101 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | © 2023 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/),which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. The terms on which this article has been published allow the posting of the Accepted Manuscript in a repository by the author(s) or with their consent. |
| Keywords: | Albania, architecture, difficult heritage, Fascism, Italian colonialism. |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of Arts and Humanities UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of Arts and Humanities > SELCS |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10172762 |
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