Gramsci’s regional grievance shaped his later anti-colonial internationalism.

Evidence

A unique surviving essay from his schooldays at Cagliari shows him, too, already progressing from a Sardinian to an internationalist and anti-colonialist viewpoint, as vehement in his opposition to European imperialism in China as in his repetition of what (he recalled in 1924) was the favourite slogan of his schooldays: “Throw the mainlanders into the sea!” — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 40

Categorization

• XREF: The colonized-region-to-anti-imperialist arc is a recognizable life pattern that later postcolonial and Islamophobia scholarship relies on — a personal template of how internal colonization radicalizes against external empire.