Italian Colonialism and Resistances to Empire, 1930–1970 by Neelam Srivastava (review)

When looking at the book under review here, the first striking feature is the chronology of the investigation. Scholars familiar with Italian colonial history are mainly accustomed to frame their research between the "scramble for Africa" and the Second World War, keeping an eye on the peculiar political circumstances that occurred in former Somalia Italiana, which after the end of formal colonial rule and from 1950 until 1960 became an Italian trusteeship administration (Amministrazione Fiduciaria della Somalia [AFIS]) following a UN agreement. Beyond the institutional time frame questions about colonial heritage, memory, and continuities after colonialism in republican Italy have constituted an important field of research in recent years, also due to the reception of postcolonial studies in historical writing. And, of late, the issue of when Italian colonialism ended has been addressed by scholars of social and political historical research.¹

Neelam Srivastava's book does not strictly focus on the political dimension of colonialism, but instead on cultural production generated in specific political contexts. The book presents itself as "a cultural history of Italian colonialism and anticolonialism" (1) set within the development of an oppositional discourse to Western imperialism in the years between the world wars. The main interest of the book is its investigation of how Italian anti-imperialistic cultural discourse contributed to—and was entangled in—a wider global phenomenon of political and cultural anticolonialism. In the center of the investigation, there are intellectual and political movements, places, and persons to which individual chapters are devoted. Although the analysis stretches out until the 1970s, the key moment to which the book constantly refers is the Ethiopian War (1935–37), which has been seen as a turning point in the history of black internationalism and anticolonialism. But the Ethiopian War also determined the unique temporality of Italian colonialism. In fact, fascist Italy embarked on a brutal and bloody war against Ethiopia and so obsessively pursued the plan of an empire at a moment in which the legitimation of European colonial powers was deeply challenged and an anticolonial political agenda was strong not only in colonial territories but also in European capital cities. Important scholarship has underlined the transnational dimension of anti-imperial and anticolonial discourse in urban European culture.²

Neelam Srivastava's approach is different. In her book, the Ethiopian War is a global moment from which a wave of anticolonialism unravels to reach several places around the globe. The focal points are to be found in Ethiopia itself as well as in Italy, Britain, and the United States. Further, the conflict between Italy and Ethiopia is not only a contraposition between the fascist regime and the old African empire, but also one informed by competing notions of race. The whole rhetoric of the fascist civilizing mission clearly clashes with contemporary fights for the emancipation of black communities. In this context it is brilliant to look—as Srivastava does—at the literary productions of the Harlem Renaissance, an expression of the vitality of a black community that had a fundamental point of reference and identification in Ethiopia. The long history of the Ethiopian Empire and the survival of the country's independence in the age of European imperialism in Africa conferred on Ethiopia a noble position in black culture as an "imagined homeland" (104) for all in the African diaspora. Ethiopia and the Ethiopian War became the scene of several novels published at the time. Investigating this popular literature in terms of anti-imperialism is a fascinating and innovative undertaking. However, the reader might have benefitted from an assessment of how this literature was received among contemporary readers.

Other sources analyzed are the journalistic works by British activist and Ethiopian connoisseur Sylvia Pankhurst, who gave voice in Ethiopia to antifascist positions and to denunciations of Italian brutalities. This section of the book also offers nuanced views of the different positions vis-à-vis fascist Italy: liberal British culture was not necessarily opposed to fascism and...