Forging the new world: an anthropological gaze into "La difesa della razza" panopticon

The purpose of this essay is to explore the DdR as a panoptical space, where colonial visual encounter was reproduced in the effort of forging the new imagined empire. By a participant reading as well as a critical anthropological perspective, I analyze the assertive scientific rhetoric that contributors of the journal used to visualize the ‘true’ but hidden racial substance of human body. The scientific image of man was strategically supported by the ethnographic photo collection of Lidio Cipriani, thus according an aesthetic and cultural evidence of racial paradigm. I further look upon one of the most stylistically impressive cover of DdR, which discloses its creative inspiration from the ‘primitivist hybridization’ of artistic avant-garde