Marinetti called World War One the “finest Futurist poem.”  Rather than spout mere rhetoric, however, he and his Futurist confrères put their bayonets where their pens and brushes were.  Several members served in a Futurist battalion on Italy’s Alpine front, and two key figures – the painter, sculptor, and theorist Umberto Boccioni and the architect Antonio Sant’Elia – died during the conflict.  Death in a modern conflagration appeared infinitely more glorious to many than a genteel death amidst bourgeois comforts.  War proved constitutive to Futurist ideology from its start (Marinetti called it “the world’s only hygiene”) to its ignominious end (with Marinetti serving even in World War Two on the Russian front).  The movement’s vocal support for the Fascist regime saw it champion colonial violence in Libya and the vicious occupation in Ethiopia.  

It is one of the delicious ironies of history that this shameful chapter has come full circle in the phenomenon of Afrofuturism, which seeks to reclaim narratives about African culture from longstanding “primitivist” tropes.  My book briefly discusses this phenomenon alongside Post-Columbian Futurism, Indo-Futurism, and Indigenous Futurism(s), considering how elements of Italian Futurism are now marshalled against the very racist and imperialist discourses which they originally abetted.  Less optimistically, it also considers how Futurist theories (and practices) of totality, both aesthetic and ideological, contributed not merely to Fascist forms of governance but late capitalist consumerism of everything from social media to Artificial Intelligence.

As its founders and practitioners insisted, Futurism is most widely associated with modern notions of technological progress.  Yet the movement never championed technology and machinery as vehicles of positivist change.  That is, their ambitions were never rational ones.  Yes, they wanted to hurtle Italy into the future (or at least the European present).  Like so many early twentieth-century avant-gardists, however, the Futurists were nourished on the almost mystical metaphysics of Henri Bergson and the will to power of Friedrich Nietzsche.  

One thing which I hope the book conveys is how much the movement viewed poets and artists of all kinds as visionaries.  This bore with it an occasionally messianic self-importance, both potentially transformative but also dangerous.  The book asks the reader to take seriously the Futurist drives to change the world (or, as one key manifesto put it, the “Futurist Reconstruction of the Universe.”  At the same time, it probes the more insidious tendencies of that insistence upon totality, and its notional and historic affinities with totalitarian culture.  We are still very much in Marinetti’s world.  Twitter/X may have replaced the “synthetic” poem.  But Futurism’s aims and failures alike contain lessons we would do well to heed.