Victims of the same destiny : Italy in the postcolonial, the postcolonial in Italy

Abstract

This thesis concentrates on a series of canonical Italian anti-Fascist writers, and argues that their work is informed and underpinned by an engagement with colonialism. Working between Italian and English, the thesis establishes an original framework for comparative reading, in which it traces neglected lines of literary influence and networks of intellectual and political dialogue between Italian and Indian writers in the inter-war and post-war periods. The first chapter explores the contours of the ‘anti-colonial imagination’ underpinning the work of Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci. Focusing particularly on his lesser-known and often un-translated pre-prison writings, it suggests that the critical terminology for which he has become best known in postcolonial studies emerges as part of his gradual elaboration of an anti-colonial position. The second chapter looks at the ways in which Ignazio Silone’s novel Fontamara represents Fascism as a form of internal colonialism, before moving on to think about the significance of its influence on Raja Rao’s Kanthapura and what the implications of this line of influence might be for our understanding of what defines postcolonial writing. The third chapter turns to the work of Carlo Levi, and argues that his lifelong commitment to exposing the internal colonization of the Italian South forms part of a broader anti-colonial commitment that carries him to India and brings him into dialogue with writers like Mulk Raj Anand. Finally, the fourth chapter charts the remarkably pervasive yet critically neglected textual relationship between Italo Calvino and Salman Rushdie, and argues that Rushdie’s postcolonial aesthetics emerge partly through his readings and re-workings of Calvino. Taken together, these four cases tell us much about how a certain trajectory of Italian anti-Fascist writing laboured towards what we might think of as forms of anti-colonial and postcolonial thought. Simultaneously, they invite us to ask questions about the unseen role that these writers have played in shaping our sense of what it means for writing to be ‘postcolonial’.