Description:
A groundbreaking volume that represents the first examination of cultural production amongst Italian prisoners of war
Captivity and Creativity explores the artistic and material production by Italian prisoners of war (POWs) and some civilian internees who were captured by the Western Allies in 1940-43 and detained in prison camps scattered across Africa, Australia, India, the United Kingdom, and the United States during World War II. Twelve chapters discuss from different theoretical and histori-cal angles the various artistic activities (e.g., theatre, music, visual arts, architecture, chapels, and material objects), technical contributions (e.g., maps, photography, radio), writings (e.g., memoirs, diaries, letters, and fiction), as well as the documentary evidence that resulted from the diverse experiences and transnational exchanges between the prisoners and their captors as military personnel and local civilian populations in different parts of the globe between 1940 and 1947. The book describes the prisoners' economic importance for the Western Allied powers in their war effort to fight Nazi-Fascism and the enforced diaspora through which POWs were moved across different allied countries. It analyzes the prisoners' daily camp life, work, and treatment before and after the 1943 Armistice, when POWs were asked to sign an agreement to renounce Fascism and become cooperators of war, underlining the different treatment reserved for coop-erators of war and noncooperators of war. The book also investigates the legacy of the prisoners' artistic and material production, the cultural heritage and the practices of memorialization (e.g., photography, monuments, museums, anniversary celebrations, exhibits) that have derived from the Italian presence in camps in different countries up to this date, through reference to groups and communities that preserve that heritage.Brief description: Bob Moore is Emeritus Professor of European History at the University of Sheffield. He has published extensively on the history of Western Europe in the mid-twentieth century, including Victims and Survivors: The Nazi Persecution of the Jews in the Netherlands, 1940-1945 (1997); Resistance in Western Europe (2000); Refugees from Nazi Germany and the Liberal European States (with Frank Caestecker, 2009) and his most recent monograph, Survivors: Jewish Self-Help and Rescue in Nazi-Occupied Western Europe, which was published by Oxford University Press in 2010. He has recently completed the editing (with Johannes Houwink ten Cate) of De Geheime Dagboek van Arnold Douwes (2018) and its translation as The Secret Diary of Arnold Douwes (2019). His work on prisoners of war includes The British Empire and Its Italian Prisoners of War 1940-1947 (with Kent Fedorowich, 2003) as well as several journal articles.
Review Quotes: This is a major piece of research. Its overall aim is to study--in a broad sense--the artistic, creative and other forms of material production linked to the hundreds of thousands of Italian prisoners of war who spent time in camps across the world during and after World War Two. This is a highly original collection of chapters and studies, crossing over disciplines around the core area of research as outlined above.---John Foot, Professor of Modern Italian History in the Department of Italian, University of Bristol and author of Blood and Power: The Rise and Fall of Italian Fascism