"Forme cinesi": Gramsci's Translatability in Italian Third-Worldism

2017

In the 1970s, when the identity of Italian “demo-ethno-anthropological” studies was being defined and their academic status consolidated, scholars debated the features of a national tradition of studies. Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks were then presented as the source of new ideas, which in the aftermath of WWII contributed in decisive ways to a renewal of scholarly theory, helping scholars to get rid of romantic leftovers such as the notion of “people-nation”, and encouraging them to turn away from “picturesque” oddities to address important social and cultural issues. This inscription of Gramsci into the genealogy of Italian anthropological studies, which recognizes the important role his thought played in scholarly debates, nonetheless risks concealing the different readings his reflections received when they were first published soon after the war (1948-1951). The paper focuses on the debate regarding Gramsci and folklore organized by the Gramsci Institute in Rome in the lat...

2020

This paper traces the connection between cultural work and power in the thinking and writing of Italian socio-political theorist and strategist, Antonio Gramsci. His rootedness in Marxism and a deep humanistic culture are emphasised as well as how his main conceptual tools (e.g. Hegemony, Intellectuals, ‘Popular Creative Spirit’, Critical Appropriation and ‘National-Popular’) are central to his analyses of different forms of cultural production, intellectual activity and educational developments in his time. The paper dwells on his musings on the ever so pertinent issue of Migration as it found expression in the literature of his time and their implication for reflection on the same issue in more recent times. Importance is given to the role of political and artistic movements of the period such as Futurism and their legacy for present day life. Parallels are drawn between Gramsci’s cultural views and those of later thinkers such as Raymond Williams, Stuart Hall and Henry A. Giroux...

International Journal of Cultural Policy, 2010

H-Italy, 2021

On July 19, 1928, Antonio Gramsci — a rabble-rousing factory organizer originally from Sardinia and, perhaps most important, the founder of the Communist Party of Italy (CPI) — walked through the gates of Turi Prison on the outskirts of the southern Italian city of Bari to begin serving a twenty-year sentence. Hunched and disfigured from a life-long struggle with arteriosclerosis, the then thirty-seven-year-old Gramsci was not being incarcerated by Benito Mussolini’s dictatorship for any violent offenses. Indeed, Grasmci’s only “crime” had been his influential role as Italy’s — and, increasingly so, Europe’s — preeminent Marxist intellectual. As one of the regime’s prosecutors in Gramsci’s case phrased it, illustrating the fascist regime’s anxieties with respect to the middle-aged Sardinian’s revolutionary program in Italy, “for twenty years we must stop this brain from functioning.” Despite the efforts put forth by Il Duce’s regime in silencing him, however, Gramsci’s mind, unencumbered by his increasingly poor health, would go on to produce some of the most brilliant and deeply influential political philosophy of the twentieth century. Beginning in 1929 — the year after his arrival at Turi Prison — and ending in 1935, Gram‐ sci produced over thirty notebooks consisting of some three thousand pages of short essays, notes, and conceptual fragments on a wide variety of topics and themes, ranging from the many roles played by “organic intellectuals” in forging bourgeois modernity (as well as in sharpening the industrial proletariat’s revolutionary potential in overcoming capitalism) to, perhaps Gramsci’s most lastingly influential concept, the significance of “cultural hegemony” in manufacturing and controlling any given society’s collective beliefs, values, and practices. Volumes of historiographical and political scientific literature have been written on Gramsci’s life and work in Italy. But what about the Italian revolutionary’s various posthumous, global influences in places well beyond Europe’s geopolitical boundaries? When and in which sociopolitical contexts did Gramsci’s writings gain traction among the global Marxist Left? And what were the factors behind Gramsci’s presences, as well as absences, among Marxist thinkers during the eighty- four years since the CPI founder’s untimely passing? Such are some of the questions taken up by the various studies featured in Roberto M. Dainotto and Fredric Jameson’s rich and intellectually ambitious edited volume, Gramsci in the World.

Political Studies Forum , 2022

Antonio Gramsci’s theory of hegemony, based on the importance of consensus, is the antecedent of the recognition of the democracy by the Italian Communist Party (terrain that would be fully acquired by its successors, Togliatti and Berlinguer). Gramsci takes the word and the concept from the debates at the top of international communism and –adapting it to his theory of the “revolution in the West” – changes and innovates it profoundly in the Prison Notebooks, making it an idea that is today widespread and used throughout the world. Palmiro Togliatti, who returned to Italy in 1944, became a protagonist in the writing of the post-war democratic Constitution and theorized on the “national ways” to socialism and polycentrism; Enrico Berlinguer theorized on the universal value of democracy and the acceptance of many liberal principles for the construction of an idea of “communism in freedom”.

Postcolonial Studies 16.1, 2013

Since the late 1930s, there have been numerous disputes and discussions concerning Antonio Gramsci's intellectual and political legacy. His ideas and writings have been subject to a range of interpretations, political appropriations, and deliberate distortions, both inside and outside Italy, resulting in various competing and contradictory 'images of Gramsci'. 1 In their volume The Postcolonial Gramsci, Neelam Srivastava and Baidik Bhattacharya provide a 'postcolonial' image of Gramsci by drawing together several leading scholars to address the postcolonial reception of his work. As Srivastava and Bhattacharya point out in the book's introduction, Gramsci's influence in the field of postcolonial studies can hardly be overstated. References to his writings appear throughout subaltern and postcolonial studies literature. However, despite the numerous references, it is doubtful if his writings are seriously read or understood within the field. References to an author are indicative of intellectual presence, but, to quote Eric Hobsbawm, they do not necessarily 'guarantee knowledge or understanding of the author'. 2 In fact, the postcolonial engagement of Gramsci has produced numerous appropriations of his work that pervade the literature, offering little more than the invocation of common phrases and concepts. Unfortunately, as Timothy Brennan's review demonstrates, The Postcolonial Gramsci does little to help alleviate this superficial engagement with Gramscian scholarship. Not only is Gramsci's Marxism deemphasized throughout the book, as Brennan points out, several of the chapters produce questionable interpretations and appropriations of his concepts. In their response, Srivastava and Bhattacharya appear to suggest that all readings of Gramsci are essentially valid, rhetorically rendering themselves and the book's contributors immune from criticism. In response to these discussions, I return to Gramsci's texts to bring into relief criteria by which to assess new readings of his work; demonstrate how his conception of Marxism is central to the task of understanding his thought; and revisit his conceptions of the organic intellectual and the subaltern in response to the book's presentations. The fact that Gramsci's writings continue to elicit new readings and interpretations to address contexts and epochs that transcend his own highlights the vitality and enduring qualities of his work. It is the nature of Gramsci's political-philosophical way of thinking, his conception of the world, his continual focus on the particular and the general, the interplay of the past and present, and his refusal to replace concrete social and political analysis with reductionist theoretical models that continue to generate international and contemporary attention. 'If Gramsci is a ''classic''', as

International Critical Thought, 2017

This research is based upon three interrelated elements: the European crisis, Italian Fascism and the analysis of the two carried out by Antonio Gramsci in the Prison Notebooks, that is, the notes he wrote during his detention in Fascist prisons from 1929 to 1935. However, the aim of this contribution is to shed light not on Gramsci's analysis of the European crisis and the regime in Italy as such, but on the way in which this analysis interacts with the constellations of political power and of hegemonic social forces existing in Italy and in Europe at the time. Gramsci's Prison Notebooks are in fact not reflections on a defeat, made far awayboth physically and mentally-from the ongoing struggle (as they have often been interpreted in the past), but a strategic analysis of opportunities for communist political initiative presented by the new European and Italian situation of the late 1920s and early 1930s.

This article is a review of the book Antonio Gramsci: A Pedagogy to Change the World (2017) edited by Nicola Pizzolato and John Holst, which brings together contributions from specialists in Gramscian educational thought from different language-regions: English, Italian, French and Latin American. Seeking to contextualize the book, the articles reconstruct the main features of the reception of Gramscian thought in the Anglophone world. This shows the vast Anglophone tradition in employing Gramsci not only in the political or cultural field, but also in the educational one. It also suggests that this tradition has reached our days, the Anglophone world being one of the main spaces in the study and use of Gramsci. The article, furthermore, outlines Gramsci’s legacy as a truly international challenge. In this sense, the book suggests a Gramscian problem that has gained an important influence in Gramscian studies over the last few decades, particularly in Italy and the Anglophone world: that of translation. This translation among intellectuals from various countries is not, to paraphrase Gramsci, “perfect” but it is essential in order to understand and assume our contemporary political-pedagogical challenges.

2020

In the last four decades the name of Gramsci has spread well beyond the boundaries of Italian political theory and Marxist thought where it was originally confined, reaching disciplinary fields as diverse as literary criticism, sociology, communication studies, anthropology, international relations, history, and linguistics, and countries as far from Italy as Korea, India, and South Africa. Why this success and still before how this success has been possible? What social conditions had to be fulfilled to have Gramsci recognized as such a key author in so many intellectual fields and regions of the world? Making use of an exceptional data set, i.e. the Gramscian Bibliography created and managed by the “Gramsci institute” in Rome, which encompasses more than 19 thousands items (books, journal articles, conference proceedings about Gramsci, as well as the whole Gramscian production including translations and different editions), our research aims at tracing the global diffusion of Gramsci’s work in Italy and out of it since the 1940s, identifying patterns, trajectories, timing, agents, and modes of its reception in different national contexts and languages. Focusing on both translations of Gramscian texts and critical writings on and about Gramsci, the chapter will provide quantitative data about the global circulation of a thought whose international success has been certainly favored by Marxist internationalism and the Italian geopolitical location after WWII, but also hampered by the original language and the textual genres (private letters and personal notebooks written while in prison) in which it was embedded, as well as the strong national focus and disarming fragmentation of its content. We suggest that all these seemingly negative conditions exerted indeed a positive effect on the reception process, allowing for highly selective (and idiosyncratic) local appropriations, flexibility in publishing strategies, and the building of context-specific consecration strategies.

2008

Discussion and research on Gramsci have for a long time been a predominantly Italian issue, or rather a question intrinsic or mainly referring to the history of the Italian Communist Party (PCI). It has seemed obvious then, for a whole generation of studies on Gramsci, to link his legacy to the history of the party that he had helped to found.