Professor David Atkinson David.Atkinson@hull.ac.uk
Professor of Cultural and Historical Geography
‘Colonial science’, the production of space and its afterlives in Italian North Africa
People Involved
Project Description
After crushing the nomadic-Bedouin resistance in Cyrenaica, Libya, with genocidal reprisals (1923-1931), Italy’s Fascist regime funded the Italian Geographical Society and Geographical Military Institute to survey, map and understand the Saharan interior. Through this method -theorised as ‘Colonial Science’- Italy constructed and politised its colonial domain of Libya. Between 1932 and 1936 the regime organised seven expeditions mobilising a range of academic disciplines to study and characterise an Italian Libya. Their research programme’s included eugenic and biopolitical methodologies, plus a research ethics policy (possibly the world’s first) and a public-facing media campaign. This fellowship interrogates this late-colonial programme for the first time. Using written and visual archives it explores how self-consciously modern, scientific practice and its performativity produced colonial territory and represented a unified Libya as part of metropolitan Italy. It also illustrates how the Libyan state it produced continues to shape the structure, politics and post-coloniality of North Africa
| Type of Project | Project |
|---|---|
| Status | Project Live |
| Funder(s) | British Academy |
| Value | £46,666.00 |
| Project Dates | Sep 1, 2022 - Aug 31, 2023 |
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