Lies and Life: The Other Italians

2018

1998

2017

This is a new approach to one of the greatest political theorists, Antonio Gramsci. Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks are one of the most popular Marxist texts available and continue to inspire readers across the world. In Using Gramsci, Michele Filippini proposes a new approach based on the analysis of previously ignored concepts in his works, creating a book which stands apart. Including chapters on ideology, the individual, collective organisms, society, crisis and temporality, Using Gramsci offers a new pattern in Gramscian studies aimed to speak to the broader audience of social sciences scholars. The tools that are provided in this book extend the uses of Gramsci beyond the field of political theory and Marxism, while remaining firmly rooted in his writings. Working from the original Italian texts, Filippini also examines the more traditional areas of Gramsci’s thought, including hegemony, organic intellectuals and civil society.

2017

Gramsci in the World, 2020

Revisiting Gramsci’s <i>Notebooks</i>, 2019

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...

The whole issue can be downloaded at http://ro.uow.edu.au/gramsci/vol2/iss3/ Table of Contents: Special Issue: Gramsci and Anthropology: A “Round Trip” edited by Sabrina Tosi Cambini and Fabio Frosini Editorial - Derek Boothman 1 Editors’ Introduction - Sabrina Tosi Cambini, Fabio Frosini 2 Introduzione dei curatori - Sabrina Tosi Cambini, Fabio Frosini 17 Part I: Uses of Gramsci 1. Elizabeth L. Krause, Massimo Bressan - Via Gramsci: Hegemony and Wars of Position in the Streets of Prato 31 2. Veronica Redini - «Un nuovo tipo umano». Per un antropologia del lavoro industriale a partire da «Americanismo e Fordismo» 67 3. Alessandro Simonicca - Recuperare la scalarità del denso, tra resistenza e studying up 87 4. Alessandro Deiana - Folklore come egemonia. Comprendere la cultura popolare; riconoscere la subalternità; lottare sul terreno della cultura? 113 Part II: History 5. Roberto Beneduce - History as Palimpsest. Notes on Subalternity, Alienation, and Domination in Gramsci, De Martino, and Fanon 134 6. Riccardo Ciavolella - Gramsci in antropologia politica. Connessioni sentimentali, monografie integrali e senso comune delle lotte subalterne 174 7. Fabio Dei - Popolo, popolare, populismo 208 8. Gino Satta - Gramsci’s «Prison Notebooks» and the “re-foundation” of anthropology in post-war Italy 239 Part IV: Intersections 9. Eugenio Testa - L’incanto del serpente. Gramsci in contrappunto tra Giorgio Baratta e Alberto M. Cirese 258 10. Lelio La Porta - Lo studio « disinteressato» come nuovo terreno applicativo della scienza dell’educazione 288 11. Roberto Dainotto - Filosofia, filologia, e il «senso delle masse» 306 Part IV: Memos and interviews 12. Piergiorgio Solinas - Egemonia e gerarchia, tracce nei «Quaderni del carcere» 331 13. Luigi M. Lombardi Satriani - Pluralismo degli ordinamenti giuridici e le «“nuove” credenze popolari» gramsciane: la sfida della modernità 342 14. Eugenio Testa - Notizie sul «Regesto gramsciano» di Alberto M. Cirese 351 15. Pietro Clemente - Gramsci ed io. Intervista (a cura di Sabrina Tosi Cambini e Fabio Frosini) 357 Part V: Reviews 16. Anthony Crézégut - Pour Tosel, un Aufklärer dans les Holzwege gramsciens 372

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.

2017

This article argues that the writings of Antonio Gramsci should be situated in their rightful social, philosophical, political, in short, 'historical' context. This is particularly true of his prison writing which is a rich resource but one which calls for delicate archaeological handling. It appears that Gramsci’s Marxism is unapologetically eclectic but this results in an integrated and surprisingly harmonious theoretical and practical approach to history and society. This can be brought to sharp focus only by close examination of the educational properties of Gramsci’s historical environment, the suggestions it makes, the perceptible possibilities it entails, that which blocks or impedes movement and progress, and so on. That is to say, Gramsci was not an abstract thinker. His thinking is grounded in the class war of the Italy of his time and, in turn, this was attuned to the broader struggle against capitalism in and beyond Italy's borders. This is arguably the way G...