This book presents a cultural history of Italian colonialism and anti-colonialism. Its aim is to show that Italy’s imperial ambitions played a fundamental, though overlooked, role in the development of an oppositional discourse to Western imperialism more broadly. I examine this claim in relation to a significant moment in the history of empire and resistance: the interwar period, which witnessed the consolidation of anti-colonial ideas that prefigure the work of postwar postcolonial theory.
The Italian case presents some unique and distinct characteristics compared to the far more established liberal empires of Britain and France, which were based on a stronger and older sense of national unity. Italy, as a rather belated newcomer on the imperialist stage, only founded its first colony, Eritrea, in 1890, barely 30 years after unification in 1861. The colony of Somalia soon followed, and then Libya was invaded in 1911, forming the “fourth shore” of Italy’s national territory. Italian colonialism influenced the articulation of anti-colonial discourse precisely because it was so belated; the fascist regime’s illegal invasion of Ethiopia occurred in 1935, when anti-imperialist movements and alliances were flourishing across the globe, and Western public opinion was beginning to seriously question the values underpinning the imperial project. Empire, in other words, was in crisis. Italy’s actions in Ethiopia received widespread international condemnation and therefore provided a golden opportunity for anti-colonial activists, especially Pan-Africanists, to highlight the cruelty and barbarism of imperialism to an increasingly sympathetic global audience.
Furthermore, the coexistence of Italy’s colonial aspirations with massive emigration altered the standard structure of the colonial relationship as it was conceived within British and French imperialism, and sowed the seeds of Italian internationalist and Third-World solidarity. Early Italian colonial theories, by championing what Mark I. Choate calls “emigrant colonialism”, emphasized the ways in which Italy could become an internationally significant power in the world through the exportation of its labour and the dissemination of typically “Italian” cultural and social traits abroad; it could also boost its economy thanks to the remittances that emigrants sent back home.1 The word colonia held two meanings in this early period: it meant both Italian emigrant communities abroad (for example, in North and South America) and Italian colonial territories in East Africa. It made complete economic and political sense for Italy to pursue a policy that promoted emigration and overseas territories at the same time, because, unlike France and Britain, Italy lacked capital to invest in establishing colonies abroad. Such an approach to colonialism shakes up conventional understandings of hegemonic versus subaltern relationships in postcolonial studies, as it does not distinguish neatly between colonization and diaspora. By contrast, in British and French colonial theories, it was through territorial conquest that the colonizer’s cultural and political hegemony could be established over colonized populations.2
At the same time, emigration was symptomatic of Italy’s “internal colonialism”, the systematic exploitation of the Italian working classes on the part of the elites, and of the wealthy North extracting maximum economic advantage out of the impoverished South. As Antonio Gramsci acutely observed in the early 1930s, “the poverty of a country is relative […] emigration is a consequence of the inability of the ruling class to put the population to work and not of national poverty.”3
Gramsci’s radical critique of colonialism responded directly to Mussolini’s brand of social imperialism that was presented to Italians as their right to a “place in the sun”. But colonialism, in Gramsci’s reading, simply cannot be justified by the need for Lebensraum; it instead stems from internal hegemonies, which subject subaltern classes within the nation to economic and political exploitation. Francesco Crispi, a liberal Prime Minister who strongly supported Italian colonial expansion in the Horn of Africa, presented the “mirage” of African colonies to the Southern Italian peasant as a diversionary tactic to avoid effecting a more equitable redistribution of land in Italy itself, and to consolidate the hegemony of the political ruling class over the rural masses of the South.4
In response to Mussolini’s imperialism, in the 1930s the Italian Communist Party (PCI), steered by Gramsci’s internationalist vision and by the Comintern’s supportive stance towards anti-imperialist movements, outlined a specifically Italian anti-colonialism, which looked outwardly towards global solidarity with the oppressed, and with migrant labor worldwide, because Italians had experienced first-hand discrimination and oppression both as emigrants and within their own country. The PCI promoted a radical anti-colonial campaign against the Italian invasion of Ethiopia, also hoping that this costly war would prove so unpopular with the working classes that it could serve as a form of leverage to topple the fascist regime. On the contrary, Mussolini’s aggressive vision of an Italy finally obtaining a position of international prestige alongside the other great European powers prevailed so strongly that the establishment of the “Italian empire” after the invasion proved to be the highest point of Mussolini’s popularity.
But the seeds of Italian anti-colonial internationalism had been sown, also thanks to the strenuous propaganda efforts of the exiled PCI in the interwar years and to the anti-fascist resistance during the Second World War. The Italian Resistenza was later recast as a war of liberation against fascism, and the postwar period saw an attempt to reconstruct an idea of the nation that distanced itself from its fascist past. This experience profoundly marked a generation of ex-partisans and left intellectuals, who saw decolonization movements of the 1960s and 1970s as an ideal continuation, in the postwar period, of anti-fascist struggle. Giovanni Pirelli , an active supporter of the Algerian Front de Libération Nationale (FLN) and a close friend of Frantz Fanon, wrote in 1969 that
Here we can see that Pirelli’s understanding of the meaning of the Italian Resistance was shaped by his subsequent involvement with the Algerian cause. Later chapters of this book explore the extraordinary influence Third-World revolution had on Italian radical culture of the postwar period, tracing its effects in the “resistance aesthetics” of films such as Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers (1966) and Valentino Orsini’s forgotten Third-Worldist classic, I dannati della terra (1969) , named after Fanon’s last work, Les damnés de la terre (The Wretched of the Earth). It is important to remember, however, that the relationship the postwar Italian left had with anti-colonialism was contradictory and ambivalent, to say the least: on the one hand, there was great support for anti-imperialist struggles such as those in Algeria and Vietnam, and, on the other, a puzzling amnesia in relationship to Italy’s own colonial past.the Resistance did not at all end with the defeat of fascism. It continued and continues against everything that survives of that mentality, of those methods, against any system that gives to the few the power to decide for many. It continues in the struggle of peoples subject to colonialism and imperialism, for their real independence. It continues in the struggle against racism.5
Italian anti-colonialism is part of the wider narrative about metropolitan anti-colonialism that I trace in this book, namely a global politics of resistance that developed between 1930 and 1970, which would crystallize into cross-reciprocal solidarities between anti-fascists and anti-colonialists in the lead-up to the Second World War. Indeed, anti-colonialism and anti-fascism are part and parcel of the same ideal: a will to transform the nation from within, a new conception of “nation” that rejects imperialism and fascism in the same breath. The history of metropolitan anti-colonialism has not received the full scholarly attention it deserves, partly due to the prevailing tendency to produce a narrative of postcolonial thought as a stark struggle between undifferentiated “colonizers” and undifferentiated “colonized”, though, of course, it must be acknowledged that the establishment of this dichotomy had a specific political intent and thus retains a strategic validity.6 A historicist approach to postcolonial thought can serve to identify the interwar and immediate postwar periods as crucial milestones in the history of anti-colonial activism, but also encourages us to reevaluate historical figures who prepared the intellectual groundwork of postcolonial studies before it became known as such. Such figures have been left out of established narratives of the field because their political commitment to the anti-colonial cause sits uneasily with their metropolitan location or with their mistrust of the emancipatory promises held out to colonized peoples by European communism. While adopting a historicist approach, my book gives a greater attention to aesthetics, novels, films and other modes of cultural and narrative representation than might be found in more straightforwardly historiographical approaches. This allows me to identify sites of struggle for agency that are at times overlooked in historical writing, which can tend to favour structural accounts over a focus on individual agency. In the book, there is a focus on questions of genre and a careful consideration of the specific form in which anti-colonial ideas are conveyed in relationship to the text’s intended audience and to its political effects. The novel, the newspaper and the film, among other genres, are here considered together in order to offer a comparative account of anti-colonial subjectivitie...