Italian Colonialism and Resistances to Empire, 1930-1970

by Neelam Srivastava

Overview

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. 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781137465849
Publisher:	Palgrave Macmillan
Publication date:	02/01/2018
Series:	Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	507 KB

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).  

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: Introduction.-  Chapter 2: Italian Anti-Colonialism and the Ethiopian War.- Chapter 3: “Ethiopia’s Cause is our Cause”: Black Internationalism and the Italian Invasion of Ethiopia.- Chapter 4: Harlem’s Ethiopia: Literary Pan-Africanism and the Italian Invasion.- Chapter 5: A Partisan Press: Sylvia Pankhurst, British Anti-Colonialism, and the Crisis of Empire.- Chapter 6: Internationalism and Third-Worldism in Postwar Italy.- Chapter 7: African Decolonization and the Resistance Aesthetics of Pontecorvo, Orsini, and Pirelli.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“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)

Editorial 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)

From the Publisher