At the 47th ISCHE Conference in Athens (15–18 July 2026), Dr. Matteo Brera (Università di Padova / Seton Hall University) presents "Serialized Fiction, Anti-Fascist Print Culture and Pedagogies of Resistance in Italian-Canadian Migrant Communities (1938–1940)." The paper is part of DaShoW's broader historical-educational research and extends the project's central focus on the educational role of the Italian-language press across North America.
In the late 1930s, Italian migrant communities in Canada became a contested arena for educational and ideological projects. While Fascist Italy promoted loyalty and national discipline through a network of overseas schools, often in cooperation with Catholic institutions, anti-fascist activists built alternative pedagogical spaces through the migrant press. Brera's paper reads these newspapers, above all La Voce degli Italo-Canadesi (1938–1939), not as mere sources of information but as informal educational spaces: sites of political socialization where reading itself became an act of formation.
At the center of the analysis is serialized fiction — an overlooked source for the history of education. Published alongside political commentary and community news, the novellas by Luigi Spada and Estella (Teresa Noce) used accessible literary forms to convey moral instruction, encourage critical reading, and foster a shared language of dissent. Serialized fiction thus served as a covert curriculum of political literacy, countering both Fascist overseas schooling and the clerical moral pedagogy prevalent in Italian-Canadian parishes.
Methodologically, the paper treats fiction, editorial framing, and reader-oriented rhetoric as composite pedagogical artifacts, demonstrating how informal educational processes can be reconstructed from print sources not conventionally classified as educational. Situated within an interwar Canadian context marked by strong Fascist influence, culminating in the internment of Italian Canadians in 1940, it highlights the role of print culture in shaping emancipatory knowledge under authoritarian pressure.
In doing so, the paper extends DaShoW's analysis of migrant print culture beyond the US South and reinforces one of the project's central arguments: that ethnic newspapers were not merely sources of information but active instruments of education, socialization, and identity formation. The presentation is part of the panel Educational Sources of Migration: Autobiography, Print Culture, and Intellectual Mobility in Italian Transnational Contexts (1890–1950).
The paper is sponsored by the CIRSE migration group.
More on the conference: https://ische.org/
