Thursday, February 23, 2006
2005-2006/036

Guest lecturer at UI February 27to discuss
fascism in Europe between world wars

URBANA—Manuel Rota, lecturer in French and Italian and Jewish Studies, Dartmouth College, Hanover, N.H., will give a lecture entitled, "The Anti-Europeans: Fascist Europeanism between the two World Wars," on Monday, Feb. 27, at 5 p.m., in Lucy Ellis Lounge, 1080 Foreign Languages Building, 707 S. Mathews Ave., in Urbana, on the University of Illinois campus.

The lecture is free and open to the public.

In his talk Rota will address the question: Was Europeanism always antifascist?

Rota will assert that the European states have been able to learn from the catastrophes produced by fascism, Nazism and World War II.  Thus, he says, “After 1945, the racist and anti-Semitic projects that have been associated with the fascist experience have been considered illegitimate in Europe and for Europe. However, this process of learning from catastrophes has also meant that some of the debates and some of the positions assumed by the political actors during the 1920s and 1930s have disappeared from public memory.”  

In particular, Rota says, in the case of Europeanism, the ideas of the Europeanists who emerged from the resistance against Nazi-fascism were able to erase from public memory the existence of a specifically fascist Europeanism. 

The speaker also will explore the case of how Pierre Drieu La Rochelle and Julius Evola, with their fascist projects of European unity, destabilize the definition of fascism as a form of revolutionary ultranationalism.

Rota received a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley in 2005.

Rota’s talk is sponsored by the U. of I. Department of Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese.