The book looks at women's experiences of Fascism by examining the material world in which they lived in relation to their thoughts, feelings, and actions.
On April 22, 2022, Brian J Griffith, the inaugural Eugen and Jacqueline Weber Post-Doctoral Scholar in European History at the History Department of the University of California, in co-sponsorship with UCLA Center for European and Russian Studies, and the Italian Cultural Institute of Los Angeles, hosted a book talk with Diana Garvin, the author of Feeding Fascism: The Politics of Women's Food Work.
If you were not able to join the webinar live, you are welcome to watch the recording here on our page or on our YouTube channel. An audio file and a transcript of the talk are available further below.
The book talk was affiliated with the course Interwar Crisis: Europe, 1918-1939 taught by Brian J Griffith at the UCLA History Department in Spring 2022. The course has a public facing, student authored weblog, which invites readers to interact with the volume’s weekly content.
BOOK ABSTRACT
Feeding Fascism explores how women negotiated the politics of Italy’s Fascist regime in their daily lives and how they fed their families through agricultural and industrial labor. The book looks at women’s experiences of Fascism by examining the material world in which they lived in relation to their thoughts, feelings, and actions.
Over the past decade, Diana Garvin has conducted extensive research in Italian museums, libraries, and archives. Feeding Fascism includes illustrations of rare cookbooks, kitchen utensils, cafeteria plans, and culinary propaganda to connect women’s political beliefs with the places that they lived and worked and the objects that they owned and borrowed. Garvin draws on first-hand accounts, such as diaries, work songs, and drawings, that demonstrate how women and the Fascist state vied for control over national diet across many manifestations – cooking, feeding, and eating – to assert and negotiate their authority. Revealing the national stakes of daily choices, and the fine line between resistance and consent, Feeding Fascism attests to the power of food.
BOOK DETAILS
Feeding Fascism: The Politics of Women’s Food Work was published by University of Toronto Press in February 2022, where you can find the contents of the book and reviews.
AUTHOR
Diana Garvin is Assistant Professor of Italian with a focus on Mediterranean Studies at the University of Oregon.
AUDIO FILE AND TRANSCRIPT
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Duration: 00:53:13
20220422_Garvin_Feeding-Fascism-xf-lwx.mp3
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