Book Review: War through Italian Eyes: Fighting for Mussolini, 1940-1943 by Alexander Henry

Abstract

roofs in Africa felt a sense of affinity with indigenous people; others adopted roles of missionaries, educators, or ‘European masters’. In any event, the status of those ‘on the edges of whiteness’ made the refugees a problem after the war. Finding their position increasingly threatened, colonial rulers took advantage of the post-war regime, happily relocating Polish refugees to metropoles, afraid to jeopardize the ‘attributes’ of a white man. Local memory of their presence is mainly restricted to Polish churches and graveyards (e.g. in Tengeru and Masindi). Lingelbach’s use of particular terms and concepts, such as ‘refugee’, is both faultless and intentional. He examines their construction and fluid nature, adding multiple perspectives to his impressive analysis. In the course of a daring exploration of the effect that a sudden change of geographical and social context had on Polish refugees, the author deftly removes multiple and often overlapping layers of bias (orientalism, racism, antisemitism), as well as imposed or assumed labels and identifiers (nationality, class, race, religion, gender); sometimes they had already come off by themselves under those unusual circumstances. His multi-directional analysis provides an uncompromising insight into boundary-making processes. A fascinating study of the emergence of refugees’ status in modern societies, this work demonstrates that the post-war refugee regime relied as much on regional (European) as on racial categorisation; it also shows that going beyond Eurocentrism can produce truly inspiring historiographical outcomes.