Narratives of Industry and Decolonisation in Italy 1955-1965: An Allegorical Reading (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9781839544064)

Milan, late 1960s. Some graffiti appears on the walls of the industrial suburbs of Sesto San Giovanni, screaming 'Vietnam is in the factory' - a powerful allusion to the alle-gorical connections between industrial and colonial conflicts.

What did industrial and colonial discourses have in common? How did anticolonial and working-class cultures intersect in the Italy of the 'economic miracle'? Why did Italy prove to be one of the most active countries in Europe in supporting decolonisation and mediating anticolonial ideas in the 1960s?

The book answers these questions by looking at a wide variety of sources, ranging from journals to literature, film, visual and performing arts produced in Italy between the 1950s and 1960s by authors who often worked in industry, wrote about it and saw it from a critical perspective.

Erica Bellia is a Gulbenkian Early-Career Research Fellow in Italian Studies at Churchill College, Cambridge.