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Cambridge Imperial & Post-Colonial Studies
ITALIAN COLONIALISM
AND RESISTANCES
TO EMPIRE, 1930–1970
NEELAM SRIVASTAVA
Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial
Studies Series
Series Editors
Richard Drayton
Department of History
King’s College London
London, United Kingdom
Saul Dubow
Magdalene College
University of Cambridge
Cambridge, United Kingdom
The Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies series is a collection of
studies on empires in world history and on the societies and cultures which
emerged from colonialism. It includes both transnational, comparative
and connective studies, and studies which address where particular regions
or nations participate in global phenomena. While in the past the series
focused on the British Empire and Commonwealth, in its current incarna-
tion there is no imperial system, period of human history or part of the
world which lies outside of its compass. While we particularly welcome the
first monographs of young researchers, we also seek major studies by more
senior scholars, and welcome collections of essays with a strong thematic
focus. The series includes work on politics, economics, culture, literature,
science, art, medicine, and war. Our aim is to collect the most exciting new
scholarship on world history with an imperial theme.
Italian Colonialism
and Resistances to
Empire, 1930–1970
Neelam Srivastava
School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics
Newcastle University
Newcastle Upon Tyne, UK
I have been able to complete this book thanks to the fundamental support
of many people.
I would like to thank the School of English at Newcastle University for
providing me with much-needed research leave to write this book. Special
thanks to James Annesley for his continued support with this project.
I am grateful to the Leverhulme Trust for awarding me a research fel-
lowship that allowed me to spend a year researching the material for this
book.
I would like to thank Dr. Helen Pankhurst, who graciously gave me
permission to quote from Sylvia Pankhurst’s unpublished letters in Chap.
5. Many thanks to the Istituto Gramsci of Rome for giving me permission
to quote from documents in their archives and to the Archivio Giulio
Einaudi for giving me permission to quote from Giovanni Pirelli’s unpub-
lished letters.
I am grateful to the English Department and the Pembroke Center at
Brown University, where I was a Visiting Scholar in spring 2016 and
where I wrote part of this book. Tim Bewes and Leela Gandhi were won-
derfully supportive hosts. Nicola Perugini offered helpful comments at a
seminar where I presented part of this work. A loving thank you to my
cousin Meenakshi Narain and to Ulrich Heintz for hosting me in their
beautiful Providence home for many months, offering me companionship,
food and a lovely environment in which to write my book.
Robert Young has been an important guiding presence in this project,
encouraging me many years ago to research Italian colonialism and anti-
colonialism. Rajeswari Sunder Rajan provided me with a very welcome
vii
viii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
home away from home at New York University in the summer of 2016,
and her intellectual inspiration has always been crucial to my work.
Huge thanks to my dear friends Meiko O’Halloran, Robbie McLaughlan
and Anne Whitehead for supporting me and hanging out with me through-
out the writing. Joy Wang has been an amazing and patient friend from
the very beginning of this journey. I owe a very big debt of gratitude to
James Procter, who carefully read a large part of the book and whose bril-
liant comments have certainly improved its quality! Claudia Baldoli offered
invaluable advice and reading suggestions, and I am lucky to have bene-
fited from her expertise on Italian fascism. Many thanks to Tom Langley
for stimulating conversations about many matters that appear in this book,
and for reading portions of the manuscript at an early stage. Thanks to
Sadek Kessous for his friendship.
Eleanor Spaventa has seen me through this book from start to finish,
and, very simply, made me get it done. Sofia and Margherita Grimble
deserve a big thank you for always being so wonderful. Their laughter and
affection kept me sane. Simon Grimble has been a great friend throughout
and kindly read parts of the book.
Rhian Lewis saw me safely through this intellectual and emotional jour-
ney, and I am incredibly grateful for her support.
I am immensely lucky to have a supportive and loving family, who
understand the peculiar pressures of academic writing. This book is for my
mother Giulia Pancheri, my father Yogi Srivastava and my brother Amrit
Srivastava.
Finally, thank you to Taylor and Francis for allowing me to reproduce
part of my article in Chap. 2, “Anti-colonialism and the Italian Left:
Resistances to the Fascist Invasion of Ethiopia”, Interventions: Inter
national Journal of Postcolonial Studies, 8:3 (2006), pp. 413–429.
A Note on Translations
ix
Contents
1 Introduction 1
Index 263
xi
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
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 meth-
ods, 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 imperial-
ism, for their real independence. It continues in the struggle against
racism.5
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
4 N. SRIVASTAVA
not come naturally, as Schmitt seems to suggest with regard to his territo-
rial understanding of partisanship; on the contrary, internationalism is not
an instinctive defense, but a deliberate stance, an unconventional action
and, above all, an individual choice. For progressive thinkers in postwar
Italy, the Italian Resistance came to represent a more complex and less
territorial idea of the patria (homeland) than one based on mere com-
monality of origin. It was rather a partisan patriotism that aimed to replace
one type of society with another, as the Resistenza was not merely a war of
liberation from a supposed invader but a civil war between Italians, fascists
against anti-fascists, and there were no facile ethnic or national distinctions
that could signal the difference between friend and enemy.11
If to be a partisan, according to Schmitt, “is precisely to avoid carrying
weapons openly, the partisan being one who fights from ambushes, who
wears the enemy uniform and whatever insignia serves his turn, as well as
civilian clothing”,12 then the metropolitan anti-colonial partisans I discuss
here to some extent were in camouflage because they were of European
origin and were thus hidden from view in retrospective narratives of anti-
colonialism, which assumes its opponents to “belong to the other side”.
And yet these radical partisans—George Steer, Sylvia Pankhurst, Giovanni
Pirelli—who appear in this book alongside their Pan-Africanist comrades-
in-arms—George Padmore, Claude McKay and C.L.R. James—did much
to publicize and disseminate the ideas that helped to critique imperialism
among European audiences. Gandhi’s idea of “self-othering” is a herme-
neutically illuminating term to describe such activists, who were born
within the imperial culture but displayed a radical commitment to the
colonized and were influenced and inspired by their struggles. Supporters
of anti-colonialism in the metropole were influenced by anti-colonial
activists both in and outside Europe.
The protagonists of the anti-colonial politics described in this book are
not smoothly assimilable within the narrative of communist anti-
imperialism. Timothy Brennan argues that the interwar moment was a
time when “European consciousness of the colonies changed sharply.”13
By focusing the scholarly gaze onto Europe rather than the colonies, it
becomes possible to understand the effects of anti-colonialism on Europe’s
own political and discursive formations instead of following the more
well-trodden path of studying European influences on emerging polities
in the colonial world.14
While fully agreeing with Brennan on the importance of the interwar
period’s alliances and networks in the development of twentieth-century
INTRODUCTION 7
The third and fourth chapters analyze the Ethiopian war as a critical
event in the history of Pan-Africanism; examining the global black dias-
pora’s reactions to this event allows us to piece together part of the frag-
mented narrative of black internationalism. Chapter 3 offers a broad
picture of the historical impact of the war on the African diaspora, and
then homes in on the writing of Padmore, one of the founders of the Pan-
African Association. Padmore expressed his disillusionment with the
Communist International’s alleged support for anti-colonial movements
over its behavior in the Ethiopian case.18 I examine Padmore’s political
writings in relationship to the war to show that his denunciation of Italian
imperialism in Africa stood as a proxy for his opposition to imperialism per
se. In my reading of his and C.L.R. James’s work, Ethiopia thus represents
the convergence of the transnational articulation of anti-colonial resis-
tance, and Italian colonialism becomes symbolic of European fascism
more widely.
The fourth chapter discusses the emergence of literary Pan-Africanism
in relationship to the Ethiopian war. It looks at the ways in which Harlem
and Ethiopia represent two transnational “homes” for blacks in the African
American imagination. I show that the Ethiopian war prompted a rethink-
ing of race in debates in the African American press. The intellectual and
literary flourishing of Pan-Africanism as a consciously autonomous forma-
tion is exemplified through my reading of McKay’s 1941 novel Amiable
with Big Teeth, where I offer one of the first analyses of this recently dis-
covered text, and George Schuyler’s Ethiopian Stories, Afrocentric literary
narratives that present the Ethiopian war as their main theme.
Chapter 5 maps out the complex panorama of responses in Britain to
the Ethiopian war. I am interested in the ways in which these reactions
were specifically shaped by the characteristics of Italian fascist colonialism,
and how different groups and constituencies with contrasting ideological
and political agendas immediately grasped the nexus between fascism and
colonialism as linked ideological processes. My central focus in this chap-
ter is the work and writing of the British feminist and socialist Sylvia
Pankhurst, who campaigned tirelessly in favour of Ethiopia against the
fascist invasion of 1935. She produced a broadsheet, New Times and
Ethiopia News (NTEN), which supported a free Ethiopia and aimed to
keep Britain informed of the atrocities being committed by the Italians. It
also had widespread circulation in the British colonies, fostering solidarity
with Ethiopia and reinforcing Pan-Africanist sentiments. I analyze the
newspaper as a forgotten but crucial document of anti-fascist and
10 N. SRIVASTAVA
anti-
colonial internationalism in the 1930s, articulating many of the
insights about colonial relationships that would shape postcolonial dis-
course in the postwar period. I look at how NTEN gradually evolved into
a mouthpiece for the voicing of political opinions by prominent anti-colo-
nial nationalists across the colonized world (especially from Africa, Asia
and the Caribbean). I also discuss the writing of the journalist George
Steer, the Times correspondent who wrote a highly sympathetic account of
the war from the Ethiopian side, Caesar in Abyssinia (1936), in direct
contrast to Evelyn Waugh’s pro-Italian version of events in Waugh in
Abyssinia (1936).
Chapters 6 and 7 examine how postwar Italian cinema and writing
engaged with Third-Worldist thought, especially that of Frantz Fanon,
and how these cultural texts, in turn, created influential representations of
anti-colonial struggle for global audiences.19 I argue that Third-Worldism
allowed Italian intellectuals in the postwar period to find novel applica-
tions and adaptations for the concept of anti-fascist resistance. They
embraced the Algerian independence struggle in this internationalist
spirit, demonstrating a solidarity unmatched by France, the erstwhile colo-
nial power. This chapter traces an idea of “resistance aesthetics” in the
work of Italians who had come from the experience of the Resistenza and
who redeployed their memories of anti-fascist struggles in their artistic
and political commitment to Third-Worldist forms of struggle. The texts
I examine in these two chapters include the books of testimonies about
the Algerian war of independence collected by Giovanni Pirelli; the
renowned anti-colonial film The Battle of Algiers (1966) by Gillo
Pontecorvo; and The Wretched of the Earth (I dannati della terra) (1969)
by Valentino Orsini, a forgotten cinematic masterpiece about African
decolonization. My examination of these texts establishes new ways of
appreciating the legacy of Third-Worldism in the renewal of European art
and political thought after World War II. Testimony, documentary realism
and montage are highlighted here as key aspects of Pontecorvo’s, Pirelli’s
and Orsini’s “resistance aesthetics”.
Notes
1. Mark I. Choate, Emigrant Nation: The Making of Italy Abroad (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 14.
2. My study builds on pioneering accounts in the field of Italian postcolonial
studies. These have tended to focus on historical, visual and material
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The Project Gutenberg eBook of The night wire
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United
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Author: H. F. Arnold
Language: English
There’s something ungodly about these night wire jobs. You sit up
here on the top floor of a skyscraper and listen in to the whispers of
a civilization. New York, London, Calcutta, Bombay, Singapore—
they’re your next-door neighbors after the street lights go dim and
the world has gone to sleep.
Along in the quiet hours between 2 and 4, the receiving operators
doze over their sounders and the news comes in. Fires and disasters
and suicides. Murders, crowds, catastrophes. Sometimes an
earthquake with a casualty list as long as your arm. The night wire
man takes it down almost in his sleep, picking it off on his typewriter
with one finger.
Once in a long time you prick up your ears and listen. You’ve
heard of someone you knew in Singapore, Halifax or Paris, long ago.
Maybe they’ve been promoted, but more probably they’ve been
murdered or drowned. Perhaps they just decided to quit and took
some bizarre way out. Made it interesting enough to get in the news.
But that doesn’t happen often. Most of the time you sit and doze
and tap, tap on your typewriter and wish you were home in bed.
Sometimes, though, queer things happen. One did the other night
and I haven’t got over it yet. I wish I could.
You see, I handle the night manager’s desk in a western seaport
town; what the name is, doesn’t matter.
There is, or rather was, only one night operator on my staff, a
fellow named John Morgan, about forty years of age, I should say,
and a sober, hard-working sort.
He was one of the best operators I ever knew, what is known as a
“double” man. That means he could handle two instruments at once
and type the stories on different typewriters at the same time. He
was one of the three men I ever knew who could do it consistently,
hour after hour, and never make a mistake.
Generally we used only one wire at night, but sometimes, when it
was late and the news was coming fast, the Chicago and Denver
stations would open a second wire and then Morgan would do his
stuff. He was a wizard, a mechanical automatic wizard which
functioned marvelously but was without imagination.
On the night of the sixteenth he complained of feeling tired. It was
the first and last time I had ever heard him say a word about himself,
and I had known him for three years.
It was at just 3 o’clock and we were running only one wire. I was
nodding over reports at my desk and not paying much attention to
him when he spoke.
“Jim,” he said, “does it feel close in here to you?”
“Why, no, John,” I answered, “but I’ll open a window if you like.”
“Never mind,” he said. “I reckon I’m just a little tired.”
That was all that was said and I went on working. Every ten
minutes or so I would walk over and take a pile of copy that had
stacked up neatly beside his typewriter as the messages were
printed out in triplicate.
It must have been twenty minutes after he spoke that I noticed he
had opened up the other wire and was using both typewriters. I
thought it was a little unusual, as there was nothing very “hot”
coming in. On my next trip I picked up the copy from both machines
and took it back to my desk to sort out the duplicates.
The first wire was running out the usual sort of stuff and I just
looked over it hurriedly. Then I turned to the second pile of copy. I
remember it particularly because the story was from a town I had
never heard of: “Xebico.” Here is the dispatch. I saved a duplicate of
it from our files:
That was all there was. Nothing out of the ordinary at a bureau
headquarters, but, as I say, I noticed the story because of the name
of the town.
It must have been fifteen minutes later that I went over for another
batch of copy. Morgan was slumped down in his chair and had
switched his green electric light shade so that the gleam missed his
eyes and hit only the top of the two typewriters.
Only the usual stuff was in the right hand pile, but the left hand
batch carried another story from “Xebico.” All press dispatches come
in “takes,” meaning that parts of many different stories are strung
along together, perhaps with but a few paragraphs of each coming
through at a time. This second story was marked “add fog.” Here is
the copy:
“At 7 p. m. the fog had increased noticeably. All lights were now
invisible and the town was shrouded in pitch darkness.
“As a peculiarity of the phenomenon, the fog is accompanied by
a sickly odor, comparable to nothing yet experienced here.”
Below that in customary press fashion was the hour, 3:27, and the
initials of the operator, JM.
There was only one other story in the pile from the second wire.
Here it is:
Queer story, wasn’t it? Not that we aren’t used to it, for a lot of
unusual stories come in over the wire. But for some reason or other,
perhaps because it was so quiet that night, the report of the fog
made a great impression on me.
It was almost with dread that I went over to the waiting piles of
copy. Morgan did not move and the only sound in the room was the
tap-tap of the sounders. It was ominous, nerve-racking.
There was another story from Xebico in the pile of copy. I seized
on it anxiously.
I am a calm man and never in a dozen years spent with the wires
have been known to become excited, but despite myself I rose from
my chair and walked to the window.
Could I be mistaken, or far down in the canyons of the city
beneath me did I see a faint trace of fog? Pshaw! It was all
imagination.
In the pressroom the click of the sounders seemed to have raised
the tempo of their tune. Morgan alone had not stirred from his chair.
His head sunk between his shoulders, he tapped the dispatches out
on the typewriters with one finger of each hand.
He looked asleep. Maybe he was—but no, endlessly, efficiently,
the two machines rattled off line after line, as relentless and
effortless as death itself. There was something about the
monotonous movement of the typewriter keys that fascinated me. I
walked over and stood behind his chair reading over his shoulder the
type as it came into being, word by word.
Ah, here was another:
“Flash Xebico CP
“There will be no more bulletins from this office. The impossible
has happened. No messages have come into this room for
twenty minutes. We are cut off from the outside and even the
streets below us.
“I will stay with the wire until the end.
“It is the end, indeed. Since 4 p. m. yesterday the fog has hung
over the city. Following reports from the sexton of the local
church, two rescue parties were sent out to investigate
conditions on the outskirts of the city. Neither party has ever
returned nor was any word received from them. It is quite certain
now that they will never return.
“From my instrument I can gaze down on the city beneath me.
From the position of this room on the thirteenth floor, nearly the
entire city can be seen. Now I can see only a thick blanket of
blackness where customarily are lights and life.
“I fear greatly that the wailing cries heard constantly from the
outskirts of the city are the death cries of the inhabitants. They
are constantly increasing in volume and are approaching the
center of the city.
“The fog yet hangs over everything. If possible, it is even
heavier than before. But the conditions have changed. Instead
of an opaque, impenetrable wall of odorous vapor, now swirls
and writhes a shapeless mass in contortions of almost human
agony. Now and again the mass parts and I catch a brief
glimpse of the streets below.
“People are running to and fro, screaming in despair. A vast
bedlam of sound flies up to my window, and above all is the
immense whistling of unseen and unfelt winds.
“The fog has again swept over the city and the whistling is
coming closer and closer.
“It is now directly beneath me.
“God! An instant ago the mist opened and I caught a glimpse of
the streets below.
“The fog is not simply vapor—it lives. By the side of each
moaning and weeping human is a companion figure, an aura of
strange and varicolored hues. How the shapes cling! Each to a
living thing!
“The men and women are down. Flat on their faces. The fog
figures caress them lovingly. They are kneeling beside them.
They are—but I dare not tell it.
“The prone and writhing bodies have been stripped of their
clothing. They are being consumed—piecemeal.
“A merciful wall of hot, steamy vapor has swept over the whole
scene. I can see no more.
“Beneath me the wall of vapor is changing colors. It seems to be
lighted by internal fires. No, it isn’t. I have made a mistake. The
colors are from above, reflections from the sky.
“Look up! Look up! The whole sky is in flames. Colors as yet
unseen by man or demon. The flames are moving, they have
started to intermix, the colors rearrange themselves. They are
so brilliant that my eyes burn, yet they are a long way off.
“Now they have begun to swirl, to circle in and out, twisting in
intricate designs and patterns. The lights are racing each with
each, a kaleidoscope of unearthly brilliance.
“I have made a discovery. There is nothing harmful in the lights.
They radiate force and friendliness, almost cheeriness. But by
their very strength, they hurt.
“As I look they are swinging closer and closer, a million miles at
each jump. Millions of miles with the speed of light. Aye, it is
light, the quintessence of all light. Beneath it the fog melts into a
jeweled mist, radiant, rainbow-colored of a thousand varied
spectrums.
“I can see the streets. Why, they are filled with people! The
lights are coming closer. They are all around me. I am
enveloped. I——”
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