Publication; What does it mean “To Decolonize”? 5
Internal Colonization and the Countryside
In a series of texts written at the beginning of the 1920s, Antonio Gramsci depicts the so-called Italian “southern question” as a form of internal colonization, establishing a fundamental link between imperial ambitions and internal forms of colonization. Legitimized by the rhetoric of modernization, “peripheral territories” within Europe have equally been objects of internal colonization via extraction and expropriation (among them Sápmi and Ireland), forcing the local population to emigrate. The abandonment of the countryside was the natural consequence of decades of exploitation, subjugation, and migration. How do those stories of internal colonization force us to rethink contemporary migration and the countryside today?
