Italian Colonialism and Resistances to Empire, 1930-1970, 1st ed. 2018 Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series

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, both inspired 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. 

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.

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).  

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