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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, Mussolini s 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.
List 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.
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).
Summary
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.
Additional text
“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)
Report
"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)
