The intellectual as partisan: Sylvia Pankhurst and the Italian invasion of Ethiopia

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article examines the feminist, communist and antifascist campaigner Sylvia Pankhurst as a postcolonial intellectual for our times. A forgotten figure in the history of anticolonialism, Pankhurst was active in the suffragette movement and then the communist movement, before devoting her political energies to supporting Ethiopia against the Italian invasion led by Mussolini in 1935. Pankhurst’s broadsheet New Times and Ethiopia News published articles denouncing the Italian occupation as well as writing by prominent African and Asian anticolonial voices. Through the analysis of Pankhurst, this article argues for an understanding of the postcolonial intellectual as a partisan who cuts across civilizational divides, bringing together metropolitan and colonial networks of resistance. I draw on Carl Schmitt’s Theory of the Partisan in which he describes the partisan, exemplified in the political combatant of the wars of decolonization, as the emblematic figure of twentieth-century warfare. I adapt Schmitt’s theory to read Pankhurst’s militancy in favour of Ethiopia in order to argue that the partisan is not only an insurgent fighter but an individual who takes sides in the interconnected struggles against colonialism and fascism. I thus gesture to the possibility of a global theory of resistance.