I Belong Only to Myself: The Life and Writings of Leda Rafanelli

by Andrea Pakieser (Editor)

Overview

Leda Rafanelli (1880–1971) was one of the most prolific propagandists in early twentieth century Italy. She began working as a typesetter in her teens, and went on to found and run several publishing houses. Her own body of work included scores of novels, pamphlets, short stories, children’s books, essays, and poems. A comrade of Benito Mussolini before he was a fascist, she converted to both anarchism and Islam at the age of twenty, a combination characteristic of her iconoclastic approach to life and politics. Rafanelli developed her own uniquely social form of individualist anarchism, which shunned the egoist trappings of the times, and practiced a deeply personal form of Islam even as she denounced religion. She countered both patriarchy and bourgeois feminism with “feminility,” a concept that predates some similar tenets of radical feminism by many decades. As some anarchists fell in with Marinetti and futurism’s often reactionary bravado, Rafanelli boldly declared herself a “Passist.”

Weaving excerpts from Rafanelli’s novels, poems, and essays (presented here for the first time in English translation) with extensive biographical research, Andrea Pakieser traces a biographical path through the waves of strikes and insurrections that accompanied the shaky foundation of the Italian nation; the evolution and offshoots of the anarchist movement as it mixed and blended with syndicalism and egoist currents; and the chaos and insecurity brought by fascism and global war. Withdrawing from public life after WWII, Leda embarked on a new career as a palm and card reader, while working on writing biographical sketches of her anarchist comrades and continuing to invent her personal and unorthodox forms of freedom.

Andrea Pakieser is a Andrea Pakieser is a writer, researcher, and translator.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781849351959
Publisher:	AK PR INC
Publication date:	12/30/2014
Pages:	175
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.20(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Andrea Pakieser is a writer and translator currently completing a master's degree in literary translation at the University of Paris.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments v

1 Introduction: Social Sketches 1

2 Printing Presses and Papyrus 17

3 The Vocation of Propaganda 43

4 Free Love and Feminility 69

5 The Intersection of islam and Anarchism 97

6 Individualism and Futurism: Compagni in Milan 113

7 Subverting Fascism Through Fiction 139

8 Obscurity 155

Sources 165

Selected Bibliography 167

A few notes on the translations 171

Index 173