Arlena Buelli

Arlena Buelli Arlena Buelli obtained her PhD in Global History from the University of Bologna and is currently a Post-Doctoral Researcher and Adjunct Professor at the University of Naples Federico II. Her research, supported by archival work in South Africa, Morocco, the US, the UK, and France, includes peer-reviewed publications exploring transnational policing of anticolonialists, intercolonial antifascism, and Arab-Black encounters during the Spanish Civil War. One of her first major articles, published in the Journal of Global History, won the prestigious 2023 Annual Article Prize of the Italian Society for the Study of Contemporary History. She is currently completing her first book and will begin next year a FWO Junior Fellowship devoted to a new project on Afro-Arab anticolonial solidarities.

The project

Title: Entangled African internationalisms: “race” and civilization in Arab-Amazigh and Black African anticolonialism, 1910s-1950s.

"This project investigates 20th-century African anticolonial movements’ understudied efforts to transcend 'civilizational' and 'racial' divisions in their struggle against European Empires. It aims to offer the first comprehensive transnational history of the intertwined growth of Black African and Arab-Amazigh internationalisms from the 1910s to the 1950s, challenging assumptions of enclosed and separated spheres of anticolonial activism. The project employs an innovative methodology to study overlapping political communication circuits. It analyzes the transnational circulation of anticolonial media across Africa’s linguistic and cultural regions and diasporas, revealing connections across Pan-African, Pan-Arab, and Pan-Islamic networks. The areas of circulation I analyze, which capture a polycentric reality beyond established geographies of anticolonialism, include the Maghreb, West Africa, liminal spaces of exchange between them viewed from a transimperial perspective, and metropolitan sites of interaction among Afrodiasporic communities in Europe, the Americas, and the Soviet Union. This project is an important prehistory of the rise in 'civilizational' bordering between North and sub-Saharan Africa and in anti-Black violence in predominantly Arab-Amazigh countries seen over the last 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, eds. A. Brazzoduro and D. Matasci (Leiden University Press, forthcoming), 20 pp [research essay]
• ‘Ricerche transimperiali sull’anticolonialismo. Nuove spazialità e metodologie’, Il Mestiere di Storico (accepted, forthcoming), 31 pp [historiographical essay]
• ‘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, ed. Silvio Pons (Pisa: Edizioni della Normale, 2025), 22 pp. [research essay]
• ‘The transnational policing of anticolonialists: imperial intelligence, revolutionary networks, and their archives, 1905-45’, Contemporanea 26, no. 1 (2023): 143-157 [review article].
• ‘The Hands Off Ethiopia campaign, racial solidarities and intercolonial antifascism in South Asia (1935-36)’, Journal of Global History, 18, 2023, p. 47-67. [research article].
• ‘‘Three pan-Africanist readings of the “Moorish” participation in the Spanish Civil War. Langston Hughes’, Claude McKay and George Padmore’, Contemporanea 23, no. 2 (2020): 201-224 [research article].