Invasion Of Ethiopia Research Articles

Una Coscienza Coloniale: forging imperial women in the Fascist Colonial Institute of Bologna

ABSTRACT This paper studies the Fascist Colonial Institute (ICF) of Bologna as a local space in which fascist ideals of empire, gender and class collided and were reproduced. Founded shortly before Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia in 1935, the ICF served to transmit colonial consciousness to the Italian people, and, most especially, to young middle-class women. Analysis of the local Bolognese ICF, however, reveals a more complex reality. Courses designed to create fascist imperialists out of middle-class women and forge a ruling settler class for the colonies evidence that the institute used the empire as a tool to shore up gender norms in fascist Italy. The author argues that an unintended outcome of these courses was that the ICF became a space of limited freedom and of social and professional mobility for its young women participants. In addition to learning transgressive skills, these women took advantage of their affiliation with the institute, using it as a springboard for further employment opportunities. The paper is based on a rich collection of sources from the Bolognese branch of the ICF, held in the Museo Civico del Risorgimento di Bologna in the Archivio dell’Istituto Fascista dell’Africa Italiana – Sezione di Bologna.

Introduction “The Life of the World”

Introduction “The Life of the World” Bart Eeckhout, Lisa Goldfarb, and Gül Bilge Han In the end, in the whole psychology, the self,The town, the weather, in a casual litter,Together, said words of the world are the life of the world. —Wallace Stevens, “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven” THIS IS THE SECOND HALF of the twelve contributions that—with one exception—came out of the symposium on “Wallace Stevens as World Literature” organized at the University of Stockholm in the spring of 2018. We prefaced the previous issue with a brief theoretical reflection on the concept of “world literature”—a term we will continue to spell without capitals in the essays that follow. Although, like last time, we’ve tried to put the essays in a sequence that has a certain editorial logic, what we appreciated most about the dozen essays we received is their diversity of perspectives—what we called the polyphony of critical voices in our previous introduction—and their felicitous complementarity. As at the symposium, no real thematic or methodological clusters imposed themselves and so we decided against subdividing the essays in a manner that would have seemed merely artificial. This second installment of our special issue, in other words, doesn’t open a single door onto another dimension of the topic; it basically continues where we left off by further multiplying possibilities of critical engagement. Two essays nevertheless gravitated naturally to first and last place. Gül Bilge Han’s opening contribution, “‘The World in a Verse’: Stevens, World History, and Global Modernisms,” has the sweep of a synthetic introduction that sets the theoretical stakes for the topic to which we’re returning. Han looks more closely into the emergence of a global collective consciousness in Stevens’s prose and poetry during the wartime years. While Stevens dreaded how “the consciousness of the world” might replace the “imagination,” as he put it in “The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words” (CPP 655), he was also given to envisaging the imagination as a source for a global vision of collectivity, or what he called a “civil fiction” in his poetry (CPP 586). As Han argues, “the idea of poetry as an aesthetic [End Page 127] source for exploring both connectivity and distance between different geographical, cultural, and political environments builds a recurrent trope at various stages of Stevens’s career.” After all, his attempts at proposing a common fiction that could embody the collective function of poetry and art is a well-established feature of his writings during especially the 1930s and 1940s. Before applying such ideas analytically to several poems, Han takes the time to situate Stevens’s preoccupation with a globally oriented poetics against the background of recent developments in the study of global modernisms and world literature. She pays special attention to the methodological and theoretical challenges that are posed by the stretching of “historical context” to unusual proportions. To illustrate the difference in scale that a global recontextualization may entail, Han turns to the 1945 poem “Two Tales of Liadoff,” where the reader is left to negotiate between local Fourth of July fireworks as associative backdrop to the poem’s imagery and the cataclysmic dropping of atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. For a more explicit poetic manifestation of a historically informed globalized consciousness, Han then studies “The Greenest Continent,” the third section of the 1935 poem “Owl’s Clover.” There, in Stevens’s own words, the question becomes whether the “imagination, extended beyond local consciousness, may be an idea to be held in common by South, West, North and East” (L 370). Like many others, from Langston Hughes to Nazim Hikmet, Stevens constructed his version of Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia—a classic instance of Western imperialism and colonialism—from a distance through the news media. In his poem, Han notes, Stevens appeared to be “interested less in celebrating interconnectedness than in staging the exigencies of art’s mobility and collectivizing power in the face of fascism, economic deprivation, and colonial rule.” She finishes by analyzing how Stevens also envisioned a global community of the poor in his more elegiac 1938 poem “Dry Loaf.” The latter...

European museology and colonial concord: Italy at the 1934 Expo du Sahara in Paris

AbstractThis article assesses Italy's participation in the Expo du Sahara in Paris in 1934, placing it within the framework of European colonial culture, exhibitions, and international relations during the 1930s. Hitherto, the Expo du Sahara has been largely ignored by historiography, but it offers important insights into Italo-French relations in the years immediately preceding Italy's invasion of Ethiopia, as well as the ways in which Fascist Italy sought national and international legitimacy through the medium of exhibitions. The Paris exhibition, staged by the European powers after years of clashes, was also a physical representation of the so-called ‘colonial concord’ and ‘peaceful’ partition of North Africa, processes in which Italy's role was fundamental.

The Italian Empire and the Great War by Vanda Wilcox

The Maghreb Review, Vol. 47, 1, 2022 © The Maghreb Review 2022 This publication is printed on FSC Mix paper from responsible sources BOOK REVIEWS / COMPTES RENDUS Books reviewed in The Maghreb Review can be ordered from The Maghreb Bookshop. Our catalogue is also available on our website: www.maghrebbookshop.com VANDA WILCOX, THE ITALIAN EMPIRE AND THE GREAT WAR. OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2021. In October 1911 Italy declared war on the Ottoman Empire and mounted a massive seaborne invasion of Turkish Tripolitania and Cyrenaica across the central Mediterranean. If at that time Italy was generally seen as ‘the least of the Great Powers’, so its prime foreign policy objective seemed to be the achievement of Great Power status by taking on no less an opponent than Turkey and seizing its last remaining North African possessions. But what was expected to be a swift and simple campaign, a mere ‘military parade’, turned into a vicious and prolonged war of colonial conquest. And, as Vanda Wilcox argues in her new study of the Italian empire, the story of Italy and the First World War actually begins with the war against Ottoman Turkey in 1911, after which Italy was to experience more than a decade of conflict, ending only in 1923-4 (or up to 1932 in the case of Libya). During the Libyan war the Italians for the first time used many of the latest tools of twentieth century technology – barbed wire and machine guns, motor transport, aircraft (both airships and aeroplanes, tried and tested for reconnaissance, target-spotting, strafing and bombing) and (thanks to Guglielmo Marconi) wireless. Yet Wilcox asserts that among the obvious defects of this imperial venture into Libya were an essentially inept military machine and precarious state finances, both with serious implications for Italy’s forthcoming performance in the First World War. Intriguingly, she argues that the Italo-Turkish war of 1911-12, and the two Balkan wars of 1912-13 are integral to an understanding of how the First World War began, and also many aspects of how it was fought. She suggests that ‘it was the succession of defeats suffered by the Ottomans in North Africa and the Balkans which began the process of destabilising the precarious European balance of power’. (p.13) (Here there seems to be an echo of events that led up to the Second World War, notably the international crisis provoked by Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia in 1935.) Wilcox also suggests that for Italy the most important legacy of the Italo-Turkish war was the experience of ‘unprecedented’ cross-party mobilisation. ‘This both demonstrated the new power of the media and mass culture to shape public opinion and indicated that the process of ‘creating Italians’ was well under way. Fatally, however, the 114 CURATED BY MOHAMED BEN-MADANI experience taught that the shared causes around which Italians could coalesce were expansionism and war.’ (p.39) Here the implications for the rise of Fascism are clear. Then, because this is a contemporary book, much space has to be devoted to issues of race and Italian ‘whiteness’ in the context of the Libyan experience. Yet given Italy’s own history of repeated invasions, partitions and foreign subjection and rule, Italians tend to be defined less by physical, racial characteristics than by culture (in the broadest sense), language and religion. And in any case the similarity in appearance of many northern Libyans and southern Italians often leaves little room for active ‘racial’ discrimination, at least on grounds of physical appearance. This book offers an arresting and important thesis, which indeed suggests that this is a subject that deserves further and wider study. The Libyan side of the story is perhaps presented with less assurance than the other issues (for instance, the common religion of Turks, Berbers and Arabs, and the allimportant role of the Sanusi religious confraternity might usefully have been given more weight). Also reliance on contemporary Italian ‘historians’ such as Angelo del Boca and his following tends to distort and even falsify much of the the Italian colonial record in Libya in particular and in Africa in general. For the writers of this school can find little good at all, no merit...

The untold stories of militiamen from Gojjam, Ethiopia: voices of distress and desperation from the Ogaden and Eritrean fronts, 1977–1991

ABSTRACT Using untapped archival documents from the Däbrä Marqos provincial archives in Gojjam, and the archives of the Ministry of National Defence (MOND) in Addis Ababa, this study attempts to investigate the untold stories of militiamen drafted into the Ethiopian army in 1977 on the eve of Somalia's invasion of Ethiopia and in the wake of the fall of many towns in Eritrea in the hands of insurgents. These men played a critical role in reversing these threats (temporarily in the case of Eritrea, on a much longer-term basis in that of Somalia), and their impact on the region's history was massive. The archival evidence gathered from the former Gojjam province sheds new light on their personal lives, and the dislocation for those left behind, which is often missing from the larger histories of the Därg's wars. Those stories have been substantiated by interviewing ex-militiamen. Many of the stories revealed in the archives are quite disturbing – broken marriages, emotional distress, separated families and the like. This study, thus, attempts to show the importance of ‘history from below’ in the construction of narratives of the Ethiopian revolutionary wars.

ИЮЛЬСКИЙ МЯТЕЖ 1936 ГОДА И МЕЖДУНАРОДНЫЙ ГАНГСТЕРИЗМ ФАШИСТСКОЙ ИТАЛИИ

The origin of the civil war is a central theme in the history of Spain in the 20th century and has given rise to intense debates. In the author's opinion, it was the result of the combination of structural conditions (economic and social underdevelopment, accelerated modernization pro-cess, resistance to it), all necessary, but not sufficient. The latter were determined by two factors: the existence of a conspiracy against the Spanish Republic since its very advent in 1931 and the inability of the republican governments to effectively cut it off in 1936. They did not know how to do so despite all the measures adopted but, at the same time Dessert, they could not either because from the first years of his life his monarchical adversaries had the help of fascist Italy. This was gradually materializing until an agreement was reached in March 1934, well known, but also very disfigured. It was the unequivocal signal that Mussolini was willing to curtail the republican experience in Spain in order to establish fascist influence in the western Mediterranean. The unequivocal signal was given in October 1935, in parallel with the in-vasion of Abyssinia. In June 1936, after victory, he turned again to Spain. His commitment materialized in contracts for the supply of war material, for a short war, on July 1 of the same year. The author has uncovered one of the most disfigured enigmas of the origin of the civil war.

The Reception of Petrarch\u2019s Africa in Fascist Italy

In his 1877 Storia della letteratura (History of Literature), Luigi Settembrini wrote that Petrarch’s fourteenth-century poem, the Africa, ‘is forgotten …; very few have read it, and it was judged—I don’t know when and by whom—a paltry thing’. Yet, just four decades later, the early Renaissance poet’s epic of the Second Punic War, written in Latin hexameters, was being promoted as the national poem of Italy by eminent classical scholar, Nicola Festa, who published the only critical edition of the epic in 1926. This article uncovers the hitherto untold story of the revival of Petrarch’s poetic retelling of Scipio’s defeat of Hannibal in Fascist Italy, and its role in promoting ideas of nation and empire during the Fascist period in Italy. After briefly outlining the Africa’s increasing popularity in the nineteenth century, I consider some key publications that contributed to the revival of the poem under Fascism. I proceed chronologically to show how the Africa was shaped into a poem of the Italian nation, and later, after Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia, of Italy’s new Roman Empire. I suggest that the contestations over the significance of the Africa during the Fascist period, over whether it was a national poem of Roman revival or a poem of the universal ideal of empire, demonstrate more profound tensions in how Italian Fascism saw itself.

Bulworth (1998) and Cradle Will Rock (1999): Critiquing Capitalism in the Late 1990s

Bulworth (1998) and Cradle Will Rock (1999):Critiquing Capitalism in the Late 1990s Martin Halpern The 2008 economic crisis and the Occupy Wall Street movement that began in 2011 produced wide-ranging discussions about the failings of the existing capitalist order and the need to imagine alternatives to it. Since the emergence of Bernie Sanders as a national figure, the term "socialist" has been a focal point of discussion. Some of the debate involves little more than redbaiting. Indeed, the combination of climate change, the coronavirus, and the presidency of Donald Trump brought a continuous stream of worrisome news that has left little room for optimistic reflections. Searing film portraits of our anxious times such as Sorry to Bother You seek to awaken viewers to the depths of malevolence through which we are living. Rather than examine the dystopian visions in recent films, I will look back at two films from the late 1990s that explore socialist and communist ideas. Indeed, artistic critiques of capitalism and imagining of alternatives to it have been features of cultural life even in quiescent and conformist periods such as the 1990s. Despite the disarray in progressive circles resulting from Clintonite centrism in the 1990s, two major film stars, thanks to their ability to leverage financing for major film projects, gave movie audiences an opportunity to critique a social system that was seemingly stable. Set, respectively, in the 1990s and in the 1930s, Warren Beatty's 1998 film Bulworth and Tim Robbins's 1999 film Cradle Will Rock grappled with the dilemma of how one can both survive within an unjust social order and perhaps even transcend it. Each film focuses on the preservation of individual dignity and either explicitly or implicitly contributes to the strengthening of collective struggle against late capitalism. As well-financed feature films appealing to a mass audience Bulworth and Cradle Will Rock provide critiques of elite capitalists and the capitalist system and offer sustenance and support for the idea that "another world is possible."1 Tim Robbins's 1999 film Cradle Will Rock provides a window on the New Deal. At the center of the film is the 1937 effort to stage Marc Blitzstein's pro-labor opera The Cradle Will Rock while the film's rapidly shifting scenes provide insightful glimpses on the mural movement of Diego Rivera, the struggles of steel workers and the unemployed, women's leadership roles, new opportunities for African Americans, and the roles of anti-communist, pro-fascist, and big-business opponents of the New Deal. The film's central focus is on whether impulses for solidarity and human caring, by artist or worker, may overcome the power of money.2 The danger that capitalists are able to use money to corrupt agents of change is evident in both the play within the movie and in the movie's story. In Blitzstein's play, we see that Mr. Mister, the dominant figure in Steeltown and a symbol of capitalist power, has successfully corrupted the clergy and the media. He also attempts without success to buy off Larry Foreman, the union leader. In the movie story, Blitzstein highlights to Orson Welles, who is about to direct his play, the vulnerability of the artist to the blandishments of capital. Welles is the host of a [End Page 37] successful national radio show and Blitzstein asks him, "How long can you whore your talents before you're used up unwanted?" Acknowledging that everyone needs money, Blitzstein probes, "The question is what will you do for the money? Where do you draw the line?" Robbins's film opens with the words "a (mostly) true story," a reference to the fact that most of the film's characters are historical personalities and to the film's culmination with the depiction of a historic event, the runaway opening night performance of The Cradle Will Rock on June 16, 1937. The film's shifting focus on other historical events that happened earlier and later–the painting and destruction of Diego Rivera's mural at Rockefeller Center in 1933 and 1934, the invasion of Ethiopia in 1935, and the House Un-American Activities Committee hearings on the Federal Theatre Project in 1939...

La honte blanche ou Quand Montherlant prenait le parti de l’Éthiopie

In October 1935, as Mussolini’s troops invaded Ethiopia, Montherlant wrote a short text, La honte blanche, which began with these words: “Colonization is indefensible in its principle.” This text was never published, but took the form of two articles that Montherlant had published on September 25 and October 16 in the weekly Marianne under the single title: Une statue au vaincu, in the sense of the manifestos he had signed to protest against the invasion of Ethiopia and in the sense of La Rose de sable, this great anticolonialist novel composed between 1930 and 1932 whose full publication was deferred until 1967. It even announced the most famous word from Le Maître de Santiago (1947): “The colonies are made to be lost.” It is hardly necessary to add, moreover, how much La honte blanche is topical at a time when some are taking down, or wanting to take down, here the statues of a sovereign, elsewhere those of a Southern general, elsewhere those of the discoverer of America.

The League of Nations, autonomy and collective security

Abstract This article tests the assumption that in institutional and legal design the League of Nations was incapable of providing collective security. The lens through which this issue is scrutinised is the concept of institutional legal autonomy, in other words the legal separation of the organisation from its member states. The thinking is not necessarily that the greater the autonomy the greater the potential of the organisation to fulfil its functions, but that the organisation already had sufficient autonomy in international relations to provide an effective form of ‘collective security’, a term that was not found in the Covenant but, by 1935, was being used to describe the response of the League to the Italian invasion of Abyssinia in 1935. This article tests the assumption that the League did not have sufficient autonomy in terms of collective judgment and power to deliver collective security.

Appeasing Hitler: Chamberlain, Churchill and the road to war

What should we do about dictators who threaten their neighbours and seize their territory? It is as much of a question today as it was in the 1930s, which witnessed the rise of Hitler and Nazism. The Treaty of Versailles, signed 100 years ago, was intended to set the seal on the war to end all wars. Yet only 20 years later Europe and beyond were plunged into a Second World War. Tim Bouverie's brilliant and meticulously researched account of the vain attempts to appease Hitler reads like a thriller, though demonstrating strong academic rigour. There is no doubt that Versailles punished Germany through the loss of territory and colonies, and through reparations and limits on military power. It sowed in German minds the seeds of injustice that Hitler was able to exploit. Mussolini's invasion of Abyssinia, in an attempt to build an Italian empire in Africa, and the failure of the League of Nations to react, convinced Hitler that Germany could acquire new territories with impunity. Hitler gambled that Britain and France would fail to react to the occupation of the Rhineland in 1936, despite their military superiority at the time. Early warnings from Winston Churchill and Sir Horace Rumbold, the British Ambassador in Berlin, about the long-term intentions of Hitler and the brutality of the Nazi regime fell on the deaf ears of Prime Ministers Stanley Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain.

Concealing African Art: Ardengo Soffici and Carlo Carrà’s Ambivalent Primitivism

Post-colonial scholarship on Italy is an important field, but has not adequately examined the reception of ‘primitive’ art before and during Fascism. For instance, Italian primitivism before World War I has been studied, but its implications with respect to colonialism, racism, and the transnational rise of a formalist approach to modernism have yet to be fully explored. Unfortunately, Italian artists’ disavowal or modification of their primitivism has contributed to this. In order to remedy this, my paper traces how Ardengo Soffici and Carlo Carrà’s appropriation of African sculpture was replaced by a preference for folk or naïve art in writings and works of art. I also consider futurist primitivism between the wars, since artists such as Fortunato Depero and Enrico Prampolini also shifted their approach; after the invasion of Ethiopia, their celebration of African-American’s modernity was expelled in order to configure a colonial iconography during late Fascism. Eventually, racist critics and publications such as La Difesa della razza simultaneously rejected and relied on primitivist avant-gardism, adding yet another layer to this complex dependence. In general, Italian artists absorbed and later dismissed exotic primitivism, which had been mostly used as a critique of the West, to renew Italian culture according to nationalist conceptions. The range and number of works that referenced Africa and its culture demonstrates the complex nature of this reliance/disavowal, revealing Italy’s fraught relationship to the exotic. Moreover, a similar approach that minimized the role of African art within modernism was employed in the United States, which also obscured certain aspects of Italy’s primitivism.

Reluctant Humanitarians: British Policy Toward Refugees in Kenya During the Italo-Ethiopian War, 1935–1940

ABSTRACTFollowing the Italian invasion of Ethiopia in 1935, several hundred Eritrean deserters from the Italian army and several thousand Ethiopian officials, soldiers, and civilians fled to Kenya. British officials on the border, in Nairobi, and in London found themselves deeply conflicted over how to deal with these refugees. Sheltering refugees was costly, and it antagonised the Italians whose friendship (or at least neutrality) the British hoped to win in Europe and in eastern Africa. But vocal critics in London watched for any signs of mistreatment or forced repatriation of the refugees. Government officials themselves expressed a revulsion at the possibility of turning away or repatriating refugees who feared for their lives. Because of this humanitarian sentiment, Kenya sheltered the refugees until the liberation of Ethiopia, much to the dismay of government officials.

American Writers and the Approach of World War II, 1935–1941: A Literary HistoryShell Shock, Memory, and the Novel in the Wake of World War I

American Writers and the Approach of World War II, 1935–1941: A Literary HistoryShell Shock, Memory, and the Novel in the Wake of World War I

The Italo‐Abyssinian Crisis and Australian Settler Colonialism in 1935

AbstractBy exploring the themes of settler colonialism and modernity in Australian commentary about Italy's invasion of Abyssinia in 1935, this paper sets out to consider Italy's war in north Africa as an international crisis with significance for Australian progressive narratives about Aboriginal conditions, status and rights important to Australia's international reputation. Thus, Australia's role as a member of the League and a mandatory power will be read in the context of international debate about Italy, modernity, race and violence.My case study draws from the experiences of Bessie Rischbieth, alternate delegate for Australia to the League of Nations in 1935, who observed the Abyssinian protest being made before the Assembly. Rischbieth was seemingly persuaded by Italy's claims to the right to land and territory in the context of immigration restrictions into the United States (and we might add, in relation to Australia) and was provided evidence of slavery in Abyssinia mobilised by Italy and earlier by the Anti‐Slavery Society in London in defence of the civilising influence of Europe upon a fellow (non‐European) member of the League. However, Rischbieth was also an activist within liberal humanitarian networks critical of Aboriginal policy in Australia in this same era. Her responses to the crisis in African and League affairs offer some insight into the proximities between settler colonialism in Australia and the ‘race’ issues raised by the annexation of Abyssinia by Italy, and its implications for collective security and global governance.

The multicultural First World War: Memories of the West Indian contribution in contemporary Britain

The experiences of West Indian soldiers in the First World War have received renewed attention during the centenary commemorations. By exploring how the West Indian contribution is imagined in the media and creative arts, this paper problematizes the historical memory linking military service to citizenship in multicultural Britain. During the conflict, West Indian participation was used to suggest that the British Empire stood united in the face of German aggression. Through the 1920s and 1930s, the contribution of West Indian volunteers was recalled to support many political campaigns, including West Indian self-government and pan-African campaigns opposed to the Italian invasion of Ethiopia. Although West Indian soldiers were often excluded from combat roles, these movements relied on the rhetoric of masculine military sacrifice. Post-independence, West Indian nation states recalled imperial military service to affirm national identity. For the descendants of West Indian migrants in Britain, First World War military service may serve to underpin claims to equal citizenship. Government agencies and funding organizations have also turned to the West Indian war memory to increase community cohesion. The paper concludes that memories of belonging predicated on past military service are problematic. Non-combatant service may be overlooked and troubling histories avoided.

Ethiopian foreign policy and the Ogaden War: the shift from “containment” to “destabilization,” 1977–1991

With Siad Barre's invasion of Ethiopia in 1977, the military regime of the Derg implement policies aimed at the weakening and destabilization of the Republic of Somalia. This initiative was not entirely novel but was based upon precautionary plans first laid down under the imperial administration of Haile Selassie. The defeat of the Somalia army in the Ogaden would in fact herald the beginnings of the collapse of the power of Siad Barre and the Somali state, but the destabilization of Somalia has also destabilized the entire region of the Horn of Africa. This article charts the Ethiopian response to Somali irredentism at this crucial time, particularly focusing on the clandestine operations by the Derg to permanently eliminate the threat posed by Somalia. Previously untapped archival materials from the Ethiopian Ministry of Foreign Affairs are used as the basis for this analysis of Ethiopia's foreign policy.

G. Bruce Strang, editor. Collision of Empires: Italy's Invasion of Ethiopia and Its International Impact

Journal Article G. Bruce Strang, editor. Collision of Empires: Italy's Invasion of Ethiopia and Its International Impact Get access G. Bruce Strang, editor. Collision of Empires: Italy's Invasion of Ethiopia and Its International Impact.Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate Publishing Company. 2013. Pp. xii, 385. £70.00. The American Historical Review, Volume 119, Issue 2, April 2014, Page 663, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/119.2.663b Published: 01 April 2014

Black Internationalism, Subaltern Cosmopolitanism, and the Spatial Politics of Antifascism

This article explores black internationalist articulations of antifascism in the 1930s through a discussion of the “maps of grievance” mobilized by African American volunteers in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade during the Spanish Civil War. It interrogates how African American volunteers linked the conflict in Spain to Mussolini's invasion of Ethiopia and to struggles against white supremacy in the United States. Through making such linkages, black internationalist intellectuals and political activists have made significant, if frequently neglected, theoretical and political engagements with fascism and antifascism. By decentering the national in internationalism and situating forms of subaltern cosmopolitanism as constitutive of internationalist political activity, it reconfigures aspects of the spatial constitution of internationalism.

Ends of the Universal: The League of Nations and Chinese Fascism on the Eve of World War II

AbstractFascist Italy's 1935 invasion of Ethiopia and the League of Nations’ handling of the crisis resonated strongly in Nationalist China, where it recalled the League's failure to thwart Japan's claims to Manchuria in 1931. As these two crises unfolded, the League became a nexus around which Nationalist Party debates about the position of colonized and semi-colonized countries within the extant world order crystallized. Party adherents reflected on China's and Ethiopia's positions as independent nation states with limited territorial integrity or juridical autonomy, and assessed this situation in light of their respective League memberships. While party liberals continued to view the League as a flawed but worthwhile experiment in global governance, newly-emerged fascist activists within the party denounced it as an instrument for curtailing the sovereignty of weak nations. From these conflicting views of the League, it can be discerned how Nationalist disunity was partially grounded in disagreements over the nature and ideal structure of the global order, and how Chinese fascists agitated to escape from modern structures of imperialist domination while reiterating the latter's racial and civilizational exclusions.