Perpetuating Fascism: Propaganda and the Temporality of Phonography

In this article, I analyse how Italian fascism aimed to perpetuate itself through the use of sound media, especially phonography. I examine how propaganda expressed and was shaped by the articulation between fascism’s regime of historicity - its relationship to time - and the regimes of temporality of phonography and radio - the temporal framework in which they frame the actions that mobilise them. To do so, I have chosen to investigate, after presenting a brief political history of Italian phonography, two practical and social fields crucial to the perpetuation of fascism: education and war. The former prepared the way for the latter, and both were tasked with propagating the ideal of national regeneration placed at the heart of this political project, thereby offering an ideal field of investigation to better understand how the regime of historicity determined its manifestation in the field of propaganda and the dissemination of its imaginary. I shall refer to sources from state archives, the general and specialist press, and a discography of around 900 propaganda records produced for a research project concerning the recorded sound propaganda of the Italian fascist regime.