6

Conceptions of Subalternity
in Gramsci
Guido Liguori

Introduction: the late fortunes of a Gramscian concept

The Gramscian category of ‘subaltern’ has only become one of the most
prominent and used Gramscian concepts in the last 20 years or so. In
Italy, at the end of the 1940s and the beginning of the 1950s there had
however already been a significant precedent in its usage – albeit a limited
one – in the polemical debate on the subject of the ‘popular subaltern
world’ that appeared in the pages of the journal Società between Ernesto
Martino (a great Italian anthropologist close to the Left but culturally
formed in the school of Benedetto Croce) and Cesare Luporini (perhaps
the most important philosopher and Marxist among PCI militants in
this period).1 The dispute was at least in part concerned with the role to
be assigned to the working class – as the ‘true’ revolutionary class – in
the field of this ‘popular subaltern world.’
Today, this theme of the relationship between the working class
and ‘subalterns’ is again pertinent, albeit in a manner that is partially
different from that of the De Martino–Luporini dispute. One of the
reasons for the recent success of this Gramscian category is its diver-
sity and greater inclusivity than the traditional Marxist concepts of ‘the
proletariat’ and ‘the working class.’ These latter categories are in fact
directly connected to relations in the system of production and to social
classes. The concept of the ‘subaltern,’ on the other hand, applies to the
relations of force and power beyond the terrain of socio-economic rela-
tions, as the below analysis will explore.
The late ‘fortunes’ of this category gleaned from Gramsci – which,
as we will see, refers above all to ‘subaltern classes’ – arose out of the
formation of a group of intellectuals dedicated to the field of ‘Subaltern
Studies.’ The group was made up of a collection of Indian scholars led by

118
M. McNally (ed.), Antonio Gramsci
© Mark McNally 2015
 Conceptions of Subalternity in Gramsci 119

Ranajit Guha who, at the beginning of the 1980s, proceeded to extend

subaltern studies across US universities (a process that was aided by the
mediating efforts of the Bengalese scholar Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
and his famous essay ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’). In the 1990s, this early
work was developed further, as awareness of the important category of
the ‘subaltern’ was spread across the rest of the world.2
The fortunes of this Gramscian concept can also be attributed to a
series of partial misunderstandings. Joseph Buttigieg3 was already
explaining in the course of the First World Congress of the International
Gramsci Society in Naples in 1997 how the dissemination of this
Gramscian category had taken place under the auspices of scholars –
of mainly Indian origin – with only a partial knowledge of Gramsci’s
writings. For Buttigieg this was a consequence of the fact that these
scholars had acquired an understanding of his concept through an
anthology of Gramsci’s writings in English edited by Quintin Hoare and
Geoffrey Nowell Smith.4 The latter placed at the head of a series of texts
on Italian history and the Risorgimento two notes from Notebook 25
which Gramsci had entitled ‘On the Margins of History (The History of
the Subaltern Social Groups)’ – yet the title and the Notebook were not
even cited. As Marcus Green has noted, from this arrangement of the
notes on the subaltern classes, ‘it is not apparent or even suggested that
Gramsci wrote many notes on the subaltern or that he devoted an entire
notebook to the concept.’5 The Indian historians, led by Guha, who at
the beginning of the 1980s had given birth to ‘Subaltern Studies,’ thus
indicated through this arrangement their belief that Gramsci’s obser-
vations on the subalterns were only relevant to Italian history, and
particularly the history of the process of Italian unification. Indeed, they
affirmed that they wanted to do the same for India as Gramsci had done
for Italy in studying the relations between ‘the leaders’ and ‘the led’ in
the Risorgimento. More generally, these historians drew on the work of
Gramsci above all to assert the necessity of a historiography which was
not limited to the elites and the ruling classes, but rather would also
take account of – and in some cases even privilege – the history of the
subaltern social groups.
In fact, as the term ‘subaltern’ (or ‘subalterns’) passed through the
Anglo–American universities it experienced something of a change of
direction that led it increasingly away from its specifically Gramscian usage
and conceptual context. Scholars influenced primarily by the deconstruc-
tionism of Derrida or the thought of Foucault often used the category of
‘the subaltern’ or ‘subalternity’ in a rather lax manner.6 The term conse-
quently lost all ties with the theoretical and political constellation which