"Colonialism Come Home: The Spanish Civil War and Global South" 13 views

Colonialism Come Home: The Spanish Civil War and the Global South examines how the intervention of Global South thinkers and allies in the Spanish Civil War links Spain to the global history of anticolonialism. It reads the Spanish Civil War against an archive of anticolonial thinkers and activists from Cuba, Morocco, Palestine, and the U.S. South for whom General Francisco Franco’s fascist coup represented an extension of the history of Spanish colonialism that was now directed against Spaniards themselves. It analyzes, for instance, Franco’s writings on his background in Moroccan colonization through the Rif war; transnational dialogues on displacement and revolution between Afro-Cuban poet Nicolás Guillén, African American writer Langston Hughes, and Palestinian communist Najati Sidqi; the ways that Mississippi-born African American authors Richard Wright’s and James Yates’s travel writings use Spain under fascist attack to reflect on the Jim Crow South; and the influence of Moroccan anticolonialism on Spanish antifascism and on the later Cuban Revolution through General Alberto Bayo’s tactical mentorship of Che Guevara. Colonialism Come Home builds on the work of these thinkers to argue that a conscious anticolonial influence on Spanish antifascism, then and now, is relevant and necessary for the development of a Spanish revolutionary politics that may align itself with a Global South political imagination.

PHD (Doctor of Philosophy)

English

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2026-05-06