This book began with a discussion of how Italian cultural production during the liberal period and scholarly interpretations of it have either attempted or neglected to confront racialization as a critical part of the discursive formulation of Italians as modern political subjects. Subsequent chapters illustrated how biopolitics opens up the interpretative field, allowing readers to “see” race at the intersection of a variety of problem areas that preoccupied post-Unification thinkers. In calling for a biopolitical reading of Italian racial discourse, I have been taking implicit aim at two commonplaces in studies of modern Italy: the first concerns the origins of Italian state racism and the second concerns the ideological and rhetorical splitting of projects of nation- and empire-building. First, many genealogies of Italian state racism either explicitly or implicitly figure its spontaneous inception within the fascist “parenthesis.” This positioning is often accompanied by a(nother) narrative of Italian belatedness, in which Nazi Germany is figured as the sinister inventor of state racism and fascist Italy is depicted as merely having jumped on board an ideological train that was already in motion. Such perspectives grew out of political necessity. At the close of World War II, anti-fascist intellectuals who had been silenced during the fascist ventennio (those, that is, who did not perish in prison or exile) began to emerge from the figural and literal wreckage in order to ask how such a political tragedy could have found in Italians such an accommodating cast of characters. Historical, political, and even literary studies produced in this climate seemed to have a choice among a finite number of explanations for the rise of fascism: their answers ranged from trivialization to condemnation, from casting blame on others to parodic self-loathing. And one thing was sure: fascism, and all of its familiar and bulky apparatuses, had to be purged not only from public offices, but from public consciousness. The racist persecution of Italian Jews (not to mention the colonized) was for many one of the most horrifying expressions of fascist violence, and as such, some intellectuals were eager to salvage the remnants of the Italian liberal democracy, distancing it from its nefarious successor. It was in this context that Italy's preeminent historical materialist philosopher Benedetto Croce famously proclaimed fascist Italy as a “parenthesis” in Italian history.