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Italian Colonialism and Resistances to Empire, 1930-1970

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  • © 2018

Overview

Authors:
  1. Neelam Srivastava

    1. School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics, Newcastle University, Newcastle Upon Tyne, United Kingdom

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  • Examines Italian colonialism and its impact on the development of anti-colonial movements
  • Explores the deep ethical and political links between anti-fascism and anti-colonialism
  • Re-thinks the relationship between Marxism and postcolonial studies

Part of the book series: Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies (CIPCSS)

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Table of contents (7 chapters)

  1. Front Matter

    Pages i-xi
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  2. Introduction

    • Neelam Srivastava
    Pages 1-13

  3. Italian Anti-colonialism and the Ethiopian War

    • Neelam Srivastava
    Pages 15-63

  4. “Ethiopia’s Cause Is Our Cause”: Black Internationalism and the Italian Invasion of Ethiopia

    • Neelam Srivastava
    Pages 65-99

  5. Harlem’s Ethiopia: Literary Pan-Africanism and the Italian Invasion

    • Neelam Srivastava
    Pages 101-146

  6. A Partisan Press: Sylvia Pankhurst, British Anti-colonialism and the Crisis of Empire

    • Neelam Srivastava
    Pages 147-193

  7. Internationalism and Third-Worldism in Postwar Italy

    • Neelam Srivastava
    Pages 195-231

  8. African Decolonization and the Resistance Aesthetics of Pontecorvo, Orsini and Pirelli

    • Neelam Srivastava
    Pages 233-262

  9. Back Matter

    Pages 263-266
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Keywords

About this book

This book provides an innovative cultural history of Italian colonialism and its impact on twentieth-century ideas of empire and anti-colonialism. In October 1935, Mussoliniʼs army attacked Ethiopia, defying the League of Nations and other European imperial powers. The book explores the widespread political and literary responses to the invasion, highlighting how Pan-Africanism drew its sustenance from opposition to Italy’s late empire-building, and reading the work of George Padmore, Claude McKay, and CLR James alongside the feminist and socialist anti-colonial campaigner Sylvia Pankhurst’s broadsheet, New Times and Ethiopia News. Extending into the postwar period, the book examines the fertile connections between anti-colonialism and anti-fascism in Italian literature and art, tracing the emergence of a “resistance aesthetics” in works such as The Battle of Algiers and Giovanni Pirelli’s harrowing books of testimony about Algeria’s war of independence, bothinspired by Frantz Fanon. This book will interest readers passionate about postcolonial studies, the history of Italian imperialism, Pan-Africanism, print cultures, and Italian postwar culture. 

Reviews

“This book offers a much-needed contribution to a transnational approach in the history of Italian imperialism. For anyone trying to understand the importance of the Second Italo-Ethiopian War in international anti-imperial thought, this book offers a valuable starting point.” (Eileen Ryan, The American Historical Review, Vol. 124 (4), October, 2019) “This is a book we have been waiting for: a history of Italian colonialism and anti-colonialism presented through their relation to each other. Srivastava weaves a story of the complex relations between Italian colonialism, the nation-state and migration in the late 19th and early 20th century, showing how growing resistance to Italian colonialism operated within a global framework of radical transnational anti-imperialism that stretched from Harlem to Moscow. It was Italian colonial modernity that signalled the beginning of the end for Western colonialism, the efflorescence of its dying fall. A must-read for anyone interested in the history of modern empires and how they were made to fail.” (Robert J.C. Young, New York University, author of White Mythologies (1990), Colonial Desire (1995), and Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction, 2001)   

Authors and Affiliations

  • School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics, Newcastle University, Newcastle Upon Tyne, United Kingdom

    Neelam Srivastava

About the author

Neelam Srivastava is Senior Lecturer in Postcolonial Literature at Newcastle University, UK. She has co-edited Indian Literature and the World: Multi-lingualism, Translation and the Public Sphere (2017) and The Postcolonial Gramsci (2012), and has published widely on Italian colonial/postcolonial cultures and on South Asian literature. She is the author of Secularism in the Postcolonial Indian Novel (2007).  

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