La Razza Ario-Mediterranea

This essay explores the ways in which the idea of an Italian ‘Aryan-Mediterranean’ race informed the notion of citizenship in the fascist imperial racial laws of the 1930s. The first part of the paper deals with the debate of Italian orientalists and anthropologists on the notions of Aryanism and Mediterraneanism and their link to the idea of Romanità (Romanness). I then examine how this racialism became part of the Italian colonial discourse and had an impact on the legal discourse concerning interracial relations and citizenship in colonial Eritrea from the 1900s. The paper particularly focuses on how the ‘Aryan’ and the ‘Mediterranean’ ideas of race were used conveniently both in contrast to and in conjunction with each other in the context of fascist biopolitics and the racial laws of the empire. I argue that these ideas of race addressed not only issues of cultural and national degeneration and regeneration, but also those of political inclusion and exclusion, which had a profound bearing on Italy's relations with Germany, Britain, and Europe on the one hand, and with Africa, the Mediterranean, and India on the other.