Una storia di periferia. Luoghi, contesti e attori dell’antimperialismo italiano

This editorial situates Italian anti-colonialism within a long, transnational tradition of radical internationalism stretching from fin-de-siècle anarchism to the post-1945 era. It traces symbolic and material continuities - from Pietro Gori’s Stornelli d’esilio, rooted in the exile networks of nineteenth-century anarchists, to the anti-imperialist cultural production of groups like Cantacronache during the Algerian War. Highlighting decolonisation as a catalyst for new forms of political imagination, the text argues that Third World liberation movements reshaped global geographies, generating unprecedented circulations of people, ideas, and practices. The issue of «Zapruder» proposes to reassess these dynamics by moving beyond top-down approaches focused on party leaderships, instead privileging encounters, grassroots initiatives, and everyday militant experiences. Emphasising spatial approaches and microhistorical methods, it analyses how actors located in “peripheral” yet influential sites contributed to anti-colonial and anti-imperialist struggles. Ultimately, the dossier seeks to reveal how seemingly marginal or exceptional cases illuminate broader transformations in the political cultures of the Global 1960s and 1980s.