'Good Morning,Pupil!' American Representations of Italianness and the Occupation of Italy,1943—1945

Abstract

Popular American images of Italianness before and during the second world war represented Italians as an infantile, emotional and largely apolitical people whose character was marked by cowardice and unpredictable violence. Unlike the German and Japanese peoples, who, by dint of their inherent militarism or their racialized religious allegiance to their 'god-emperor', were judged complicit in the policies of their governments, Italians were presented as the hapless victims of fascism. This construction enabled the place and significance of America's war with Italy to be systematically underemphasized and, more importantly, it allowed the Allied occupation of Italy to be framed from the beginning as an exercise in humanitarian redemption. This article examines the relationship between American representations of Italianness in films, novels and the news media, and the actuality of the Allied occupation, and contrasts it with the experience of the occupations of Germany and Japan.