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Chapter 1: Introduction -- Structure of the Book -- Works Cited -- Chapter 2: Italian Anti-colonialism and the Ethiopian War -- Introduction -- Historiography and the Ethiopian War -- Preparing for War -- Some Literary Responses to the War -- The Italian Communist Party and the Ethiopian War: An Opportunity to Topple the Regime? -- The "National and Colonial Theses" of the Italian Communist Party (1926) -- Ruggero Grieco's Report on the Colonial Policy of the Italian Communist Party (1928) -- The Italian Communist Party in Action in Colonial Africa: Egypt and Ethiopia -- Conclusion -- Works Cited -- Unpublished Material -- Published Material -- Chapter 3: "Ethiopia's Cause Is Our Cause": Black Internationalism and the Italian Invasion of Ethiopia -- Ethiopia and the Development of Pan-Africanism -- Transnationalism and Black Political Thought Between the Two Wars -- Pan-Africanism or Communism? -- Conclusion -- Works Cited -- Unpublished Material -- Published Material -- Chapter 4: Harlem's Ethiopia: Literary Pan-Africanism and the Italian Invasion -- Ethiopia, Black Freedom and the Debate on Race -- Black Literary Representations of the Ethiopian War -- The Great Ethiopian War Novel? Amiable with Big Teeth -- George S. Schuyler's Ethiopian Thrillers -- C.L.R. James and the Ethiopian War -- Works Cited -- Unpublished Material -- Published Material -- Chapter 5: A Partisan Press: Sylvia Pankhurst, British Anti-colonialism and the Crisis of Empire -- A Partisan Press: British Reporting of the Ethiopian War -- Sylvia Pankhurst's New Times and Ethiopia News -- Conclusion -- Works Cited -- Unpublished Material -- Published Material -- Chapter 6: Internationalism and Third-Worldism in Postwar Italy -- "Italian Theory" as Postcolonial Theory? -- Gramsci's Diasporic Anti-colonialism

The importance of Antonio Gramsci's work for postcolonial studies can hardly be exaggerated, and in this volume, contributors situate Gramsci's work in the vast and complex oeuvre of postcolonial studies. Specifically, this book endeavors to reassess the impact on postcolonial studies of the central role assigned by Gramsci to culture and literature in the formation of a truly revolutionary idea of the national--a notion that has profoundly shaped the thinking of both Frantz Fanon and Edward Said. Gramsci, as Iain Chambers has argued, has been instrumental in helping scholars rethink their understanding of historical, political, and cultural struggle by substituting the relationship between tradition and modernity with that of subaltern versus hegemonic parts of the world. Combining theoretical reflections and re-interpretations of Gramsci, the scholars in this collection present comparative geo-cultural perspectives on the meaning of the subaltern, passive revolution, hegemony, and the concept of national-popular culture in order to chart out a political map of the postcolonial through the central focus on Gramsci.

"The texts that make up postcolonial print cultures are often found outside the archival catalogue, and in lesser-examined repositories such as personal collections, the streets, or appendages to established collections. This volume examines the published and unpublished writing, magazines, pamphlets, paratexts, advertisements, cartoons, radio, and street art that serve as the intellectual forces behind opposition to colonial orders, as meditations on the futures of embryonic nation states, and as visions of new forms of equality. The print cultures examined here are necessarily anti-institutional; they serve as a counterpoint to the colonial archive and, relatedly, to more traditional genres and text formats coming out of large-scale publishers. This means that much of the primary material analyzed in this book has not been scrutinized before. Many of these print productions articulate collective liberation projects with origins in the grassroots. They include debates around the shape of the postcolonial nation and the new state formation that necessarily draw on a diverse and contentious public sphere of opinion. Their rhetoric ranges from the reformist to the revolutionary. Reflecting the diversity, indeed the disorderliness, of postcolonial print cultures this book covers local, national, and transnational cultures from Asia, Africa, Europe and the Americas. Its wide-ranging essays offer a nuanced and, taken together, a definitive (though that is not to say comprehensive or systematic) study of a global phenomenon: postcolonial print cultures as a distinct literary field. The chapters recover the efforts of writers, readers and publishers to produce a postcolonialism 'from below', and thereby offer a range of fresh perspectives on the meaning and history of postcolonialism"--