Arlena Buelli

Arlena Buelli obtained her PhD in Global History from the University of Bologna and is currently a postdoctoral researcher and associate professor at the University of Naples Federico II. Her research, supported by archival work in South Africa, Morocco, the United States, the United Kingdom, and France, has led to peer-reviewed publications on the transnational surveillance of anticolonialists, intercolonial antifascism, and Arab-Black encounters during the Spanish Civil War. One of her early major articles, published in the Journal of Global History, won the prestigious 2023 Annual Article Prize from the Italian Society for the Study of Contemporary History. She is currently finishing her first book and will begin a FWO Junior Fellowship next year, focused on a new project on Afro-Arab anticolonial solidarities.

The project

Title: Entangled African internationalisms: race and civilization in Arab-Amazigh and Black anticolonialism (1910s-1950s).

"This project examines the little-known efforts of twentieth-century African anti-colonial movements to transcend “civilizational” and “racial” divisions in their struggle against European empires. It offers the first transnational history of the tangled rise of Black and Arab-Amazigh internationalism from the 1910s to the 1950s, challenging the idea of compartmentalized and distinct spheres of anticolonial activism.

Drawing on an innovative methodology, it explores overlapping circuits of political communication, analyzing the transnational circulation of anti-colonial media across Africa's linguistic and cultural regions and diasporas. This approach highlights the connections between pan-African, pan-Arab and pan-Islamic networks. The spaces of circulation I study, which reflect a polycentric reality beyond the established geographies of anti-colonialism, include the Maghreb, West Africa, liminal zones of exchange between these two spaces viewed from a trans-imperial perspective, as well as metropolitan sites of interaction between Afro-diasporic communities in Europe, the Americas and the Soviet Union.

This project constitutes an essential prehistory of the rise of “civilizational” borders between North Africa and sub-Saharan Africa, as well as of the anti-black violence observed in several Arab-Amazigh majority countries over the last two decades.of interaction between Afro-diasporic communities in Europe, the Americas and the Soviet Union. This project constitutes an essential prehistory of the rise of “civilizational” borders between North Africa and sub-Saharan Africa, as well as of the anti-black violence observed in several Arab-Amazigh majority countries over the past two decades".

Hosting institution: Centre d'histoire de Sciences Po Paris

Selective Bibliography

• ‘Anticolonial and antiracist iconography across Africa and its diasporas: visual language and circulation (1910s-1960s)’ in Radical Activism in the Age of Decolonization: Theories, Practices, Connections, éd. par A. Brazzoduro and D. Matasci (Leiden University Press, 2026), 20 p.
• ‘Ricerche transimperiali sull’anticolonialismo. Nuove spazialità e metodologie’, Il Mestiere di Storico (2025), 31 p.
• ‘The Other Shore of the Spanish Civil War: African Anticolonialists and the Republican Cause (1936-39),’ in A World without Empire? Encounters and Connections between African, European, and Soviet Communists, 1920s-70s, éd. par Silvio Pons, Pise, Edizioni della Normale, automne 2025, 22 p.
• ‘The transnational policing of anticolonialists: imperial intelligence, revolutionary networks, and their archives, 1905-45’, Contemporanea, vol. 26, no 1, 2023, p. 143-157.
• ‘The Hands Off Ethiopia campaign, racial solidarities and intercolonial antifascism in South Asia (1935-36)’, Journal of Global History, vol. 18, 2023, p. 47-67.
• ‘Three pan-Africanist readings of the “Moorish” participation in the Spanish Civil War. Langston Hughes, Claude McKay and George Padmore’, Contemporanea, vol. 23, no 2, 2020, p. 201-224.