The Postcolonial Gramsci 2011

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The Postcolonial Gramsci

ROUTLEDGE RESEARCH IN POSTCOLONIAL LITERATURES
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36. The Postcolonial Gramsci edited by Neelam Srivastava and Baidik Bhattacharya
Related Titles:
Postcolonial Life-Writing: Culture, Politics, and Self-Representation by Bart Moore-Gilbert
The Postcolonial Gramsci
Edited by
Neelam Srivastava and
Baidik Bhattacharya
NEW YORK AND LONDON

First published 2012
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

The postcolonial Gramsci / edited by Neelam Srivastava and Baidik Bhattacharya.
p. cm. — (Routledge research in postcolonial literatures ; 36)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Gramsci, Antonio, 1891–1937—Criticism and interpretation. 2. Postcolonialism in
literature. 3. Criticism—Italy—History—20th century. I. Srivastava, Neelam Francesca
Rashmi, 1972– II. Bhattacharya, Baidik, 1975–
PC1064.G7P67 2011
195—dc23
ISBN13: 978-0-415-87481-6 (hbk)

ISBN13: 978-0-203-12891-6 (ebk)
Contents
List of Figures vii

List of Abbreviations xi
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction: The Postcolonial Gramsci 1

NEELAM SRIVASTAVA AND BAIDIK BHATTACHARYA
PART I
Gramsci and Postcolonial Studies
1 Il Gramsci meridionale 17
ROBERT J. C. YOUNG
2 Provincializing the Italian Reading of Gramsci 34

PAOLO CAPUZZO AND SANDRO MEZZADRA
3 The Travels of the Organic Intellectual: The Black Colonized

Intellectual in George Padmore and Frantz Fanon 55
NEELAM SRIVASTAVA
4 The Secular Alliance: Gramsci, Said and the Postcolonial

Question 80
BAIDIK BHATTACHARYA
PART II
Gramsci and the Global Present
5 The “Unseen Order”: Religion, Secularism and Hegemony 101

IAIN CHAMBERS
vi Contents
6 Gramsci in the Twenty-First Century 119
PARTHA CHATTERJEE
7 Entering the World from an Oblique Angle: On Jia Zhangke

as an Organic Intellectual 137
PHENG CHEAH
8 Questioning Intellectuals: Reading Caste with Gramsci in

Two Indian Literary Texts 165

RAJESWARI SUNDER RAJAN
9 Mariátegui and Gramsci in “Latin” America: Between

Revolution and Decoloniality 191
WALTER D. MIGNOLO
PART III
Epilogue
Interview with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak 221
List of Contributors 233

Works Cited 237
Index 251
Figures
7.1 “You can travel around the world without leaving Beijing,” with
fictitious web path of the park’s website, from title sequence. 152
7.2 Old peasant man walking past with replica of Eiffel tower in
the background, from title sequence. 153
7.3 Tao dressed as a fl ight attendant. 155
7.4 Animation of Tao flying past Tiananmen Square. 156

Abbreviations
SPNB = Selections from the Prison Notebooks. Ed. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey
Nowell Smith. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1971.
SPW 1 = Antonio Gramsci, Selections from Political Writings, 1910–1920.

Ed. Quintin Hoare. Trans. John Mathews. London: Lawrence
and Wishart, 1977.
SPW 2 = Antonio Gramsci, Selections from Political Writings, 1921–1926. Ed.

and trans. Quintin Hoare. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1978.
Acknowledgments
We would like to thank Michelle Houston for her splendid editorial work in
preparing this manuscript for publication. We would not have been able to
complete this book without her.
Neelam Srivastava would also like to thank the people who read drafts
of this work and offered helpful and constructive feedback, especially Jim
House, Carolyn Pedwell, Eleanor Spaventa, Rajeswari Sunder Rajan, and
Robert Young. Many thanks also to Claudia Baldoli for her helpful advice
on Italian historiography.
Baidik Bhattacharya would like to thank Rajeswari Sunder Rajan, Udaya
Kumar, and Mallarika Sinha Roy for their help and encouragement at vari-
ous stages of the project. He would also like to thank Renish Abraham,
Loiya Leima Oinam, and Yamini Sahista for their editorial help.
And fi nally, we would like to thank all our contributors for their gener-
osity with time and resources—without which this volume would not have
been possible.
Introduction
The Postcolonial Gramsci 1
Neelam Srivastava and Baidik Bhattacharya

This volume presents a series of essays that engage with the oeuvre of Antonio
Gramsci in relationship to the field of postcolonial studies. The importance
of Gramsci for the development of this school of critical thought can hardly
be exaggerated, and this book is the fi rst to offer a comprehensive overview
of how a number of leading postcolonial scholars have engaged with his
work. At the same time, the essays contained here draw on his thought to
understand the present moment of history that we inhabit, and suggest future
possibilities for research on Gramsci as a postcolonial thinker.
Over the past few years, there has been renewed academic interest in
Gramsci in the Anglophone world, which testifies to the continuing impor-
tance of his work for a variety of different disciplines, including politics,
international relations, globalization studies, and literary and cultural stud-
ies.2 Marcus E. Green, for example, in his wide-ranging edited collection
Rethinking Gramsci (2011), offers an overall reassessment of Gramsci for the
contemporary era within the context of a broader reevaluation of Marxist
thought today. In part, the recent emergence of this rich body of Anglo-
phone scholarship on the Italian thinker may have been prompted by the
publication of the fi rst three volumes of the complete English translation of
The Prison Notebooks by Joseph A. Buttigieg. The focus of our book, however,
differs from these recent studies. While many of the essays included here
fully engage with this new translation of the Notebooks, our aim is to examine
Gramsci’s legacy for postcolonial studies, and to revisit sites and ideas that
have been central to this exchange. As a Sardinian intellectual located in
the South of Europe, Gramsci’s “meridionalismo,” and his understanding of
subalternity as a concept that intersects nation, class, and race, continue to
offer productive lines of enquiry for postcolonial scholars.
As the essays in this collection testify, we are not aiming at an overall
reassessment of Gramsci’s work, and at the same time we are not restricting
him to certain available traditions of Marxist thinking that, quite contrary to
the spirit of Gramsci’s own writing, steadfastly offer a constrained framework
as the true context of his political writing. Our insistence on the postcolonial
is an attempt to mark our distance from such readings of Gramsci, and also
2 Neelam Srivastava and Baidik Bhattacharya
to stretch the possibilities of his texts beyond any restrictive geographical
boundaries.
Our contributors offer new interpretations of Gramsci in specific postcolo-
nial contexts, informed by an interdisciplinary thrust. Some essays examine
Gramsci’s relevance in the diverse geopolitical contexts of South America,
China, and India. Others revisit his legacy for the development of anti-colo-
nial and postcolonial theories, as we discuss in the plan of the book. We have
also strived to present a comparativist approach that links Gramsci’s position
in the complex debate on the role of the left in Italy, to his uses by scholars
in wider geographical and historical contexts. Timothy Brennan, in his 2006
book Wars of Position, warns of the perils of “decontextualizing” Gramsci

from his Italian location and argues for a philological scholarship that main-
tains an attentiveness to the textual detail of the Quaderni del carcere [The
Prison Notebooks] and the pre-prison writings. While our essays demonstrate a
sustained attention to the philological detail of his texts, often drawing both
on the Italian original and on the available English translations, they also
reiterate the importance of a non-dogmatic approach in the interpretation
of the Italian thinker’s work, insisting that there is no “single” reading of his
oeuvre. This may be to do partly with the unfi nished and ongoing nature of
the Quaderni, which can be seen as a sort of work in progress that Gramsci
was frequently revising and redrafting; and partly, of course, with the enor-
mous variety and complexity of the topics he covers.
Gramsci, as Iain Chambers has argued recently, was instrumental in help-
ing scholars rethink the understanding of historical, political, and cultural
struggle by substituting the relationship between tradition and modernity
with that of subaltern versus hegemonic parts of the world (Esercizi di potere
8). A fundamental legacy of Gramsci, as Chambers remarks, is his insistence
on the primacy of culture in the elaboration of power, “and thus of the power
of culture in the realization of a historical-social bloc” (8, emphasis in the
original). In the spirit of thinkers such as Frantz Fanon and Edward Said,
the essays in our book aim to reconsider the role of culture and its inherent
relationship to political directiveness, in the formation of a genuinely anti-
colonial way of thinking.
This introduction attempts to provide a map of reading Gramsci from
a postcolonial perspective for readers who may not be overly familiar with
his work. In the fi rst section, “Gramsci and the Colonial Question,” we give
a brief overview of Gramsci’s quite original engagement with imperialism,
which has received little discussion in the Anglophone postcolonial theori-
zation of modern empires and their legacies.3 It also demonstrates that his
relevance to the study of contemporary empires and neo-colonial forma-
tions goes beyond the indirect influence of his political concepts. This helps
us lay the ground for our claim that Gramsci can be considered a postco-
lonial thinker. In the second section, “Gramsci and the Postcolonial,” we
further develop this claim, by briefly tracing the genealogy of Gramsci in
Introduction 3
foundational moments of postcolonial thought. In this last section, we also
lay out the plan of the book, and examine how each contributor has engaged
with his work.
Gramsci and the Colonial Question

Gramsci’s own reflections on colonialism and empire were sophisticated and
forward-looking, more progressive than most Marxist and socialist thinkers
of his generation, though they retain an undeniably Eurocentric approach.
In this section, we identify three key moments of his engagement with these
issues in the Prison Notebooks. He developed these reflections over a period of

time, beginning in the late 1920s, through to the mid-1930s. First, we discuss
how he elaborates his idea of the “war of position” and “war of manoeuvre”
in relationship to anti-colonial struggle in India against British imperialism.
Second, we examine how he draws analogies between Italy and the colo-
nial context. Third, we look at Gramsci’s theory of Italian colonialism, and
its connections to the Southern Question and to economic policy after Ital-
ian Unification. We also discuss his critique of the civilizing mission, where
he indicates that anti-colonial wars of national liberation are the sign of an
achieved political maturity on the part of colonized peoples, as thinkers such
as Fanon would subsequently do.
Gramsci on Gandhi
Writing in the late 1920s, and elaborating on the parallels and divergences
between political struggle and military war, Antonio Gramsci introduces a
curious detour in his Notebooks and talks about the Indian nationalist strug-
gle, especially under the leadership of Gandhi, against British colonial occu-
pation. The connection between politics and war is one of the central rubrics
through which Gramsci explores the much larger architecture of the state
and the civil society, and, being the astute philosopher of praxis that he is,
he stretches the connection beyond figurative analogies. The complexity of
political struggle, he suggests, can be grasped through a comparison with
“colonial wars” or “old wars of conquest” where military conquest is fol-
lowed by a prolonged resistance that may assume different forms and modal-
ities. The political struggle in India against the English (and he is quick
to signal other parallels: “Germany against France,” “Hungary against the
Little Entente”) is a paradigmatic case in one’s understanding of the politi-
cal struggle as it simultaneously assumes three different forms of war: “war
of movement, war of position, and underground warfare.” Gandhi’s “pas-
sive resistance” in movements like Non-cooperation that includes strategies
like boycotting of British merchandise and colonial bureaucracy, constitutes
a war of position; it often becomes a war of movement through strategies
like “strike” and at other times underground warfare through the “secret
preparation of weapons and combat troops” (Gramsci, SPNB 229). Gram-
sci’s elliptical passage on Indian nationalist struggle cannot be dismissed
as a mere marginal entry into an otherwise Eurocentric text because of the
importance he assigns to the colonial paradigm in thinking the contours of
political struggle in his contemporary world.4 What is more, this passage,
and several other similar passages across the Prison Notebooks, constitutes a
testimony not only to the international and connected histories he had in
mind while talking about contemporary political praxis, but also of a certain
version of history he privileged in his writing. It is the version of history
that takes sudden turns to explode national boundaries, in order to accom-
modate and elaborate on unexpected locations and peoples, and to think of

historical narrative not as a tribute to monologic orthodoxy but as a plural
and heterodoxic enterprise.
The passage previously quoted does not offer the colonial location as an
additive element to larger historical narratives, but uses it as a paradigmatic
case to think of certain key concepts in Gramsci’s oeuvre. In the pages that
follow this passage, he proposes an increasing overlap between the military
and the political, and argues for a political model that must use war as a
“stimulus” and not simply as a “model” that must be emulated. Through a
series of historical examples, he outlines the way the war produces stimuli
for both the state and the civil society, and, with particular focus, delineates
the vicissitudes of organized politics that assumes different modes of war.
The colonial locations—whether India or Ireland—remain quite central to
this formulation (SPNB 230–3).
Gramsci on the Southern Question

A second point of engagement with the colonial issue is Gramsci’s treatment
of the Southern Question. He analyzes Italy as a country that presents some
intriguing analogies with colonial situations; independence and unification
came late, in 1861. Previously, Italy had been territorially fragmented, divided
up among various hereditary realms, European powers such as the Austro-
Hungarian Empire, long-standing dynasties such as the Bourbon Kingdom of
the Two Sicilies, and of course the ever-powerful Catholic Church. After uni-
fication the country was characterized by an ever-increasing gap between the
more industrialized and wealthy North and the more rural, poverty-stricken
South, with a tendency of the North to exploit the resources of the South for
its own economic development. 5 The South was reduced to a “semi-colonial
market” (Quaderni del carcere 2038).6 Gramsci argues that while the common
perception was that the North was “supporting” the South, in actual fact
wealth from the South, coming from rich landowners and feudal landlords
who exploited agricultural labor, was being diverted to the North. Thus Italy
presents itself as a case study for understanding the colonial relationship,
both in international terms—as having been both subject to external powers
Introduction 5
and a colonizing power itself—and in domestic terms—as the dominance of
the North over the South.
Gramsci argues that after 1861 there was a situation of “internal colonial-
ism,” with the North exercising political and economic hegemony over the
South. Indeed, the forms of racialist discourse that the North projected onto
the South of Italy were eerily reminiscent of colonial racisms practiced in
the British and French colonies. Gramsci links Northern racism toward the
South to the increasing exploitation of Southern material resources on the
part of the North, after Unification.
The “poverty” of the South was inexplicable to the popular masses of

the North; they did not understand that Unification had not happened
on an egalitarian basis, but as the hegemony of the North over the Mez-
zogiorno, as a territorial relationship between city and countryside. In
other words, the North, in concrete terms, was a “tentacular parasite”
that became rich at the expense of the South. (Quaderni 2021)
The common man of the North could not understand why the South had not
managed to modernize after being liberated from the ancien régime, and after
becoming part of unified Italy. The only explanation available, then, was
that people from the South were biologically inferior and barbaric (Quaderni
2022). Recent scholarship has developed these reflections on the Southern
Question to demonstrate how racism in Italy was internalized within its own
borders. Jane Schneider has identified the contemporary persistence of the
Southern Question discourse in modern Italy as a series of racialized binary
oppositions between the “civic,” industrialized North and the backward,
“clientelistic” South, which helped to produce a “neo-Orientalist discourse
within Italy itself” (“Introduction” 8). In Italy “race was used to . . . explain
persistent differences within the nation, especially divergences between the
North and the South” (Gibson 100). Lenin’s Theses on the National and Colo-
nial Questions of 1920 also influenced the way Gramsci perceived the close
analogies between colonizer/colonized and what he called “the semi-colonial
relationship” between Northern and Southern Italy (Rosengarten 140).
Gramsci on Italian Imperialism and the Civilizing Mission

A third moment of engagement with colonialism in the Notebooks is repre-
sented by Gramsci’s theory of Italian imperialism and his reflections on the
civilizing mission. Gramsci argued that the imperial aspirations of the new
nation-state were linked to the Southern Question and Italian economic pol-
icy after 1861. Gramsci notes how Italy’s need for agricultural land and space
for demographic expansion fuelled the desire for colonies among Italian
statesmen at the end of the nineteenth century, especially the Prime Minister
Francesco Crispi, who was in office from 1887 to 1896, with one interruption
(Quaderni 2019). Gramsci observes that, in classic “imperial” fashion, Crispi
presented the “mirage” of African colonies to the Southern Italian peasant
as a diversionary tactic to avoid having to effect a more equitable redistribu-
tion of land in Italy itself (Quaderni 2018), and to consolidate the hegemony
of the political ruling class over the rural masses of the South. Colonization
follows the flow of capital invested in different countries, and is never due
purely to the need to “place” its excess population (Quaderni 986; 1991). For
Gramsci, Italian imperialism was “passionate and rhetorical,” without any
real economic basis, since it lacked capital to invest in overseas markets.
Unlike other European empires, it followed a purely political logic, that of
bolstering up national unity (Liguori and Voza 143).7 Thus Gramsci sees a
close link between the Southern question and the question of colonialism.
His theory of Italian colonialism is linked to his interpretation of the Risorgi-
mento as a failed socialist, or even social, revolution, a thesis that would
have a profound and lasting influence on debates in Italian historiography,
as exemplified in the work of Rosario Romeo, and picked up by historians
such as John Davis.8
Gramsci’s views on colonialism differed sharply from those of other Ital-
ian socialists and Marxists. The poet Giovanni Pascoli, who had socialist
leanings, and the early Italian Marxist Antonio Labriola both supported Ita-
ly’s invasion of Libya in 1912. Gramsci develops his critique of the civilizing
mission by analyzing a comment made by Labriola on the idea of pedagogy
for “primitive” peoples. Labriola was asked how he would morally educate
someone from Papua New Guinea (i.e., a “native”). Labriola replied that
provisionally, he would enslave him, but he might then consider more mod-
ern forms of pedagogy for future generations. Gramsci denounces Labriola’s
remark as a form of third-rate historicism, an inadequate answer to the ques-
tion of whether “a nation or social group that has reached a superior level
of civilization can (and therefore must) ‘accelerate’ the process of education
of more backward peoples and social groups, universalizing and translating
in an adequate way their own new experience” (Quaderni 1366–7). He thus
likens the colonial question to the question of whether the ruling classes have
the “right” to dominate, both politically and morally, the lower classes. But
he emphatically disagrees with Labriola’s simplistic equation of the natives or
the people as “children.” He says that the enslavement of indigenous peoples
as a form of colonial pedagogy is in itself politically retrograde; “it is in fact
necessary that there be a struggle about this [slavery], and that this struggle is
precisely the condition through which the grand-children of the native from
Papua New Guinea will be liberated from slavery and educated to modern
Pedagogy” (1367). It is through anti-colonial/class struggle that men are edu-
cated into political maturity, argues Gramsci, not through the assimilation of
“superior” cultural and moral values of the colonizer (a point that is particu-
larly resonant in Frantz Fanon’s thinking). Further on in the passage, Gram-
sci suggests that the endorsement of slavery is the expression of a “universally
Introduction 7
immature condition” (1368). In a brilliant reversal, Gramsci demonstrates
how, far from slavery being a “necessary” condition for the entry of primitive
peoples into civilization, it is in itself uncivilized and uncivilizing.
Gramsci’s penetrating analysis of imperialism in its various guises shows
his sophisticated awareness of its role in shaping global politics between the
end of the nineteenth century and the interwar period. As Timothy Brennan
remarks, “Gramsci embodies his era’s anti-colonial energies” (Wars of Posi-
tion 233). In the next section, we will briefly examine some of the ways in
which postcolonial scholarship has drawn on Gramsci’s thought, and end by
presenting the structure of the book.
Gramsci and the Postcolonial

As is well known, postcolonial theory has in many ways appropriated and
made its own certain Gramscian terms such as the subaltern, hegemony, the
national-popular, the intellectual, and the idea of civil society versus political
society, all concepts our authors deploy in their varied takes on the “post-
colonial” Gramsci. These essays represent a new contribution to the ways
in which postcolonial theoretical debates have often constructed their own
raison d’être around these very concepts. It is precisely Gramsci’s dynamic use
and application of these concepts that has made their postcolonial reincarna-
tion so productive and indeed possible.
The influence of Gramsci in postcolonial theory can be clearly mapped
across two lines—the fi rst one starts with Edward W. Said’s Orientalism (1978)
and the second one begins with the Subaltern Studies collective in the early
1980s under the leadership of Ranajit Guha. These two moments are impor-
tant for postcolonial studies for a number of reasons, but here we wish to
highlight the various ways in which both these projects were shaped by
Gramsci’s works.
Said and Gramsci

Said describes his debt to Gramsci as a twofold one—it allowed him to think
through the puzzling question of Orientalism’s durability through history
despite its problems and shortcomings, and it also enabled him to place his
own self within the same history as a displaced Arab intellectual. In the fi rst
instance he develops the idea of hegemony to understand the efficacy of Ori-
entalist discourses. As Raymond Williams shows, the Gramscian notion of
“hegemony” allows one to think of culture as both “tradition” and “practice”
and thus to conceptualize it as much more than a superstructure. Culture
does not simply reflect an organized social structure, but in important ways
allows one to go beyond the abstractions of social and economic realities and
to relate to the world (111). When one uses hegemony to explain the strength
of Orientalist discourses, practices, and institutions, it is important to keep
in mind the distinction Gramsci makes between hegemony (egemonia) and
leadership (direzione):
a class is dominant in two ways, i.e. “leading” and “dominant.” It leads

the classes which are its allies, and dominates those which are its en-
emies. Therefore, even before attaining power a class can (and must)
“lead”; when it is in power it becomes dominant, but continues to “lead”
as well . . . there can and must be a “political hegemony” even before
the attainment of governmental power, and one should not count solely
on the power and material force which such a position gives in order to
exercise political leadership or hegemony. (SPNB 57)
The theoretical presupposition behind Gramsci’s argument here is a dis-

tinction between civil and political societies: while the consent-generating
function is part of the civil society—and here the importance of cultural pro-
duction is paramount—the other domain is reserved for the coercive appara-
tuses of the political society or the state to “enforce discipline on those groups
who do not consent” (SPNB 12).
Said’s reading of Gramsci broadly follows this argument; he argues that
culture is part of the civil society and is directly involved in the way domi-
nant ideas and discourses are generated, circulated, and maintained in any
society that is not totalitarian. That Orientalism as a discourse functions so
well despite its contradictions and forms a key part of the Western domi-
nation through imperialism can be explained if one conceptualizes it as a
result of cultural hegemony. Indeed, through the cultural hegemony of the
west Orientalism achieves its durability, strength, and functional consis-
tency. Such a notion of cultural hegemony functions by identifying a collec-
tive European self and its opposite as an equally collective non-European
other; Said even argues that the “major component in European culture is
precisely what made that culture hegemonic both in and outside Europe:
the idea of European identity as a superior one in comparison with all the
non-European peoples and cultures” (Orientalism 7). The positional superi-
ority that Europe enjoys vis-à-vis the Orient, which is derived from cultural
hegemony and which dictates a range of relationships with the Orient, has
been most prominent since the late eighteenth century, during the period
of Europe’s direct political domination over the vast imperial geography,
and it is during this period in history that one witnesses the emergence
of a “complex Orient suitable for study in the academy, for display in the
museum, for reconstruction in the colonial office, for theoretical illustra-
tion in anthropological, biological, linguistic, racial, and historical theses
about mankind and the universe” (Orientalism 7). This orchestrated effort
to construct a manageable and governable Orient shapes what can and
cannot be said about it; it enforces a representational regime, so to speak,
that shapes the contours of Orientalist discourses over the centuries. Said,
Introduction 9
however, makes it clear again through Gramsci that such “internal con-
straints” of the imperial culture “were productive, and not unilaterally inhib-
iting” (Orientalism 14); such a move is essential in Said’s theory because it
allows him to think of individual authors and texts within a larger cultural
milieu without making the author or the text always already subservient
to the political demands of imperial ideology. The point is also impor-
tant because it explains how the discourses and practices could continue
through history in the fi rst place.
Having said that, one also needs to account for the project of Oriental-
ism itself and needs further to explain the condition that made it possible.
If Orientalist discourses are indeed productive, and if they shape every

form of enunciation on the subject, how can one possibly resist the proto-
cols of such discourses and how does one write a critical history of their
workings? Said’s answer is that the possibility of critiques lies inside the
discourses, and not in any rarefied and innocent exteriority; it is his aware-
ness of being constituted as an “Oriental,” he suggests, which makes the
critical evaluation of Orientalism possible. Here again he invokes Gramsci
to argue that the “starting-point of critical elaboration is the consciousness
of what one really is, and is ‘knowing thyself’ as a product of the historical
process to date, which has deposited in you an infi nity of traces, with-
out leaving an inventory.” Said observes that the fi rst English translation
inexplicably stops here while the original Italian adds another sentence—
“therefore it is imperative at the outset to compile such an inventory”
(Orientalism 25). Orientalism for him is such an inventory, it allows him
to record those “infi nity of traces” that hegemonic Western culture has
deposited on hi subjecthood as an “Oriental”; it is a critical engagement
with historical processes at once personal and public, and an attempt to
narrate them across Said’s own self.
If Said’s account of Gramsci somewhat underplays the latter’s emphasis
on class, the next project of the Subaltern historians, on the other hand,
makes it one of their central concerns.
Subaltern Studies and Gramsci

The Subaltern Studies collective of historians, founded by Ranajit Guha,
is perhaps Gramsci’s most visible legacy in the panorama of interdisciplin-
ary postcolonial studies today. Guha has offered a recent reassessment of
Gramsci’s importance for the collective, emphasizing the unpredictable fact
that the influence of his thought on the Indian left took root in an academic
project such as Subaltern Studies, rather than in the two official communist
parties of India (“Gramsci in India” 289). The historians of Subaltern Stud-
ies, in their radical positioning to the left of these official parties, found in
Gramsci a privileged interlocutor for their political sympathies: like him,
they opposed dogmatic forms of Marxism, while supporting more militant
versions of leftist politics like the Naxalite movement (289). Guha reminds us
that the Subaltern Studies project was profoundly political, “an organic part
of its life and times,” and not just a “detached academic observation post”
(290). As such, it revolutionized “the academic establishment that had been
the custodian of South Asian studies both in England and India since the
nineteenth century” (291).
At the outset the Subaltern Studies project was designed to critique the
elitism of both liberal and nationalist versions of South Asian historiography.
In the fi rst volume of Subaltern Studies Ranajit Guha identifies the “six-point
project envisaged by Antonio Gramsci in his ‘Notes on Italian History’” as
the inspiration behind this revisionist history of South Asia (“Preface” vii).
In his contribution to the same volume, “On Some Aspects of the Histori-
ography of Colonial India,” Guha elaborates on the aspiration of the collec-
tive and defi nes the Gramscian notion of the subaltern as the autonomous
domain of the people that neither originated in elite nationalist politics nor
depended on it:
Far from being destroyed or rendered virtually ineffective, as was elite

politics of the traditional type by the intrusion of colonialism, it [politics
of the subaltern classes] continued to operate vigorously in spite of the
latter, adjusting itself to the conditions prevailing under the Raj and in
many respects developing entirely new strains in both form and content.
As modern as indigenous elite politics, it was distinguished by its rela-
tively greater depth in time as well as in structure. (“On Some Aspects
of the Historiography of Colonial India” 4)
Guha also identifies several salient features of the ideology operative in the
subaltern domain of politics that are derived from his central theoretical
concern with subordination; the new historiography he proposes is designed
to recuperate this subaltern domain of politics, a subaltern consciousness so
to speak that remains vitally important for South Asian history and society
and yet receives little attention in available historiographies. The result of
the new historiography is to take stock of the historic failure of the nation to
develop this subaltern domain to achieve national liberation; Guha’s descrip-
tion here is strikingly similar to Gramsci’s account of the failure of the Italian
nation-state:
It is the study of this historic failure of the nation to come to its own, a failure
due to the inadequacy of the bourgeoisie as well as of the working class
to lead it into a decisive victory over colonialism and a bourgeois-demo-
cratic revolution of either the classic nineteenth-century type under the
hegemony of the bourgeoisie or a more modern type under the hege-
mony of workers and peasants, that is, a ‘new democracy’—it is the study
of this failure which constitutes the central problematic of the historiography
Introduction 11
of colonial India. (“On Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial
India” 7; emphasis original)
The early volumes of Subaltern Studies broadly followed this structure

and remained engaged in reevaluating the failure of the nation from a pure
and positive description of the subaltern consciousness. Guha’s own work
elaborated on the related themes and issues.
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak mounted a critique of the project in two
related arguments—the problematic nature of the subaltern consciousness
in the project since what the collective is really interested in is a class con-
sciousness but more like the poststructuralist concept of the “subject-effect”;

and second, the problematic of representation as a strategic intervention in
historiography that remains somewhat undertheorized in the early volumes
(Spivak, “Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography”). Spivak also
transformed subaltern historiography through two fundamental shifts in the
project—fi rst, she introduced the idea of the singularity of the subaltern, that
is to say, she shifted the emphasis from a largely class-oriented category
to individual subjects who would be recognized as subaltern subjects. As
Young remarks in his essay for this book, “In a sense, it was Spivak, not
Gramsci, who invented ‘the subaltern’” (31). Her second intervention was in
the form of gendered subalternity that exposes not only the limits of subal-
ternity itself but also allows one to engage with the fundamental question of
representation in history. In her influential essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?”
Spivak rearranged not only the Subaltern Studies project but also much of
what is known now as postcolonial studies. As she commented recently her
essay was inspired by Gramsci’s “Some Aspects of the Southern Question,”
and that is partly why it argues the impossibility of liberation by class alone.
Indeed she points out that the importance of Gramsci’s formulation of hege-
mony is precisely that it is a “condition into which the subaltern graduates as
a result of a larger share of persuasion and, inevitably, some coercion from
the organic intellectuals as well as the state” (“In Response: Looking Back
Looking Forward” 232). The story of Bhubaneswari Bhaduri in her essay
testifies to such concerns—her suicide alerts one to the ethical limits of the
radical politics of subalternity. Such early engagements with Gramsci’s work
were instrumental in giving postcolonial theory a radical edge.
Plan of the Book

The chapters in this book offer interdisciplinary and original readings of
Gramsci that are not restricted to the early moments of postcolonial consoli-
dation but extend to the global structures and cultures that we inhabit now.
They concentrate on different geographical locations, and are informed by
various disciplinary concerns, in order to think of Gramsci’s insights for the
globalized postcolony. The book, likewise, is divided in three parts. The
fi rst part is designed to think through the intersection between Gramsci’s
work and postcolonial studies. As Robert Young’s chapter shows, there is
something innately postcolonial about Gramsci—be it his Sardinian origin,
or his analysis of the Southern Question in Italy, or his engagement with con-
temporary imperial issues, Gramsci was always a trenchant critic of impe-
rial occupation and exploitation. The connection between Gramsci’s work
and postcolonial theory becomes much more compelling if one situates him
in his immediate Italian context. This Italian context comes back in Paolo
Capuzzo and Sandro Mezzadra’s essay, but they want interrogate the histori-
cal context after the Second World War that shaped Gramsci’s reception. It
is not the familiar argument about the misrepresentation of Gramsci; rather

Capuzzo and Mezzadra follow diverse historical leads to show the political
stakes of reading Gramsci in the Italian context and to argue that Gram-
sci’s posthumous career in his own country has been as eventful as was his
life under the fascist regime. The Italian context is also present in the two
other chapters in this section, but here the connection between Gramsci and
postcolonial politics is much more pronounced. Neelam Srivastava’s chapter
discusses the connections between Gramsci’s concept of the “organic intellec-
tual” and George Padmore’s and Frantz Fanon’s notion of the “colonized” or
native intellectual to argue that while both distanced themselves from Com-
munism for its failure to support black liberation movements, they remain
in constant dialogue with Gramsci’s text. Through an examination of their
reflections on Pan-Africanism, Srivastava argues that Gramsci, Fanon, and
Padmore can be discussed together because of the centrality they assign to
the connection between the intellectuals and the masses in the construction
of a truly emancipatory movement for national liberation, which depends on
the development of a strong national-popular culture. Baidik Bhattacharya’s
chapter, the last one in this section, offers parallel readings of Gramsci and
Edward Said to demonstrate a different genealogy of Said’s “secular criti-
cism” in Gramsci’s “secular humanism.” The connection is important since it
allows a non-national mode of critical thinking and even enables one to think
of the globalized postcolony in different ways.
The second section of the book extends Gramsci across geographical
locations. Iain Chambers offers an innovative reading of Gramsci to think
through the fraught question of postcolonial secularism and its polyvalent
relationship with religious practices and institutions. The return of religion
as both a critique of modernity and as a “pre-modern” phenomenon that
modernity fails to deal with adequately has given rise to various debates in
our contemporary time. Chambers argues that a critical rethinking of Gram-
sci can provide fresh insights in this ongoing discussion. Partha Chatterjee
reviews current debates in India about land acquisition and the neo-liberal
agenda of development, and suggests that Gramsci’s writing still provides
important analytical insights in such debates. Chatterjee, one of the found-
ing members of the Subaltern Studies Collectives, argues that the new trends
Introduction 13
in the development of postcolonial capitalism warrant new conceptual cat-
egories, which are fundamentally different from those employed to analyze
earlier stages of capitalist development, and using some of Gramsci’s seminal
concepts he offers a re-reading of the contemporary capitalist strategies.
If Chatterjee’s attempt to evaluate Gramsci draws its empirical material
from India, Pheng Cheah’s similar attempt concentrates on China. Cheah
revisits Gramsci to think of contemporary Chinese fi lmmaker Jia Zhangke
as an “organic intellectual” and through a nuanced reading of Jia’s fi lms, he
interrogates the limits of Gramsci’s concept in a socialist context. The Chi-
nese context is particularly important since it is often viewed as an alterna-
tive possibility to the neo-liberal and market-driven world order, and hence
the plausibility or otherwise of an organic intellectual within the ambit of
socialist structures holds tremendous potential for rethinking some of the
key political concepts in our contemporary times. The next chapter in this
section is by Rajeswari Sunder Rajan, who uses Gramsci’s writing on the
leadership role of the intellectual in order to question the caste politics in
contemporary India. She uses literary texts to argue that postcolonial nar-
ratives of social struggle are typically located in the space between subal-
ternity and citizenship, and the role of the intellectual becomes important
within this space. And it is within this context, and more specifically for
her purpose, within the caste politics in India, that the Gramscian notion
of the intellectual leading the society becomes problematic. Through close
reading of texts she interrogates the postcolonial trajectory of a key con-
cept in Gramsci’s thinking. In the fi nal chapter of this section Walter D.
Mignolo takes us to the South American context, and offers a thought-
ful parallel reading of Gramsci and the Peruvian intellectual-activist José
Carlos Mariátegui. Through this reading Mignolo elaborates on Gramsci’s
influence on radical thinkers in South America, and also redefi nes some of
the key concepts of postcolonial studies. His intervention is a much-needed
re-theorization of the field away from its familiar Anglophone context,
and also a reminder that Gramsci’s writing had unexpected reception in
unusual locations.
The fi nal section of this book, an epilogue, is an interview with Gayatri
Chakravorty Spivak. In this interview Spivak revisits her essay “Can the
Subaltern Speak” and reflects on the trajectory of the subaltern in her intel-
lectual career. Quite characteristically, she connects her interest in the work
of Gramsci with larger histories of the postcolonial world, arguing how one
can re-read Gramsci in politically enabling ways.
This volume is not intended to be an exhaustive survey of all the themes
that merit future research in relationship to Gramsci and the postcolonial.
For example, studies of gender and of education in Gramsci are both fertile
areas of future enquiry. However, we feel that the essays contained here offer
the fi rst opportunity for a more sustained and in-depth conversation with
Gramsci within the field of postcolonial studies.
Notes
1. Many thanks to Jim House, Eleanor Spaventa, and Rajeswari Sunder Rajan for
their very helpful comments on earlier drafts of this introduction.
2. Recent work includes the 2011 special issue of Journal of Modern Italian Stud-
ies dedicated to Gramsci and the memory of John Cammett; Mark McNally
and John Schwarzmantel’s Gramsci and Global Politics (2009); Joseph Francese’s
Perspectives on Gramsci: Politics, Culture and Social Theory (2009); San Juan, “Anto-
nio Gramsci’s Theory of the National-Popular and Socialist Revolution in the
Philippines” (2009); Peter Thomas’s The Gramscian Moment: Philosophy, Hegemony
and Marxism (2009). Within the enormous bibliography on Gramsci, it is also
worth mentioning Jane Schneider’s Italy’s “Southern Question”: Orientalism in One

Country (1998), for its relevance to the themes of our book.
3. Giuseppe Vacca, Paolo Capuzzo and Giancarlo Schirru explore the impact of
Gramsci on cultural studies and on postcolonial studies in their book Studi
gramsciani nel mondo: gli studi culturali (2008). See also Iain Chambers (ed.),
Esercizi di potere. Gramsci, Said e il postcoloniale (2006). Among the critics who
have examined the ways in which Gramsci writes on imperialism, see V.G.
Kiernan, “Antonio Gramsci and the Other Continents,” in Imperialism and Its
Contradictions (1995), and Frank Rosengarten, “The Contemporary Relevance
of Gramsci’s Views on the ‘Southern Question’” (2009).
4. For an illuminating elaboration on Gramsci’s insights into Gandhian politics,
see Partha Chatterjee, The Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative
Discourse?, 50.
5. See John Davis, Gramsci and Italy’s Passive Revolution (1979).
6. English translations of Gramsci’s work have been used where possible. All other
translations of Gramsci in the introduction are by Neelam Srivastava.
7. Historians such as Angelo Del Boca confi rm Gramsci’s view that for Italian
political leaders, imperialism was much more a matter of prestige than of eco-
nomic gain (Del Boca 2002).
8. See Romeo 1950 (cited in Riall 71); and John Davis, Gramsci and Italy’s Passive
Revolution (1979).
Part I
Gramsci and
Postcolonial Studies
1 Il Gramsci meridionale
Robert J. C. Young
Lo stato italiano . . . è stato una dittatura feroce che ha messo a ferro

e a fuoco l’Italia meridionale e le isole, crocifiggendo, squartando,
fucilando, seppellendo vivi i contadini poveri che scrittori salariati
tentarono di infamare col marchio di “briganti.”
The Italian state . . . was a cruel dictatorship that massacred and

burned Southern Italy and the islands, crucifying, quartering, shoot-
ing and burying alive the poor peasants that mercenary writers tried
to shame by branding them “bandits.”
—Antonio Gramsci1
There has always been something postcolonial about Gramsci. In his life-
time, Gramsci had minimal effect on colonial struggle: his influence has
been felt almost entirely in the postcolonial era. Even José Carlos Mariátegui,
who left Turin in 1922 inspired by Gramsci, L’Ordine nuovo, and the Turin
1920 factory occupations, was technically a postcolonial activist-intellectual
(Young, Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction 197–99). When Gramsci
was fi rst translated into English in 1957, the introductory blurb on the back
cover described him as a Marxist philosopher “little known in the West,” as
if he was an obscure East European communist or third-world revolution-
ary (Gramsci, The Modern Prince).2 Of course Gramsci was neither of those
things. Yet in a sense, he did come from a “Third World” country.
It is difficult now to imagine how poor rural Italy used to be, even as
late as the 1960s, when Tuscan peasants still ploughed the soil with oxen,
their bells jangling as they heaved and weaved in between the olive trees,
when dusty villages in the South lay half-abandoned by their inhabitants
who had left for the United States or Argentina in search of a better life
than the grinding poverty of the Mezzogiorno. How much more so in 1891
when Gramsci was born, not into the milieu of the relatively prosperous
Italian North, but in the South, in malaria-infested Sardinia, then a far cry
from the summer playground culture of tourism and dissolute Berlusconi
parties and even today still poor in the rural regions that lie away from
the coast. Sardinia had been a former colony of a whole series of imperial
dynasties—the Catalan kingdom of the Crown of Aragon, then Spain, then
18 Robert J. C. Young
Austria-Hungary under the Hapsburgs, before becoming the Kingdom of
Sardinia in 1814, prior to spearheading Italian unification under Cavour.
Sparsely populated, with three-quarters of a million inhabitants and a feudal
infrastructure still partly intact, the five major dialects of the Sard language
(a dialect of Catalan is also spoken in Alghero) were so diverse that a version
of Italian was used as a lingua franca of communication. 3 Gramsci would
always maintain an interest in minority languages as forms of popular cul-
ture, of subaltern knowledge and resistance.4 In Gramsci’s day Sardinia had
the highest crime rate in Italy; the reputation of Sardinians was such that in
1855 the American consul at Genoa raised the question of “objectionable”
emigrants from Sardinia coming to the United States in a letter to the New
York Times. 5 Migration from Sardinia increased in the 1890s, with emigrants
moving to the Italian mainland, the US, Argentina or, after 1912, to Tunisia.
The situation of Italy in this period came closest to that of Ireland: between
1876 and 1970, an estimated 25 million Italians left Italy in search of work.
The bulk of these came from the islands and the South (Favero and Tassello).
Gramsci’s father worked as a registrar, or petty bourgeois official; in 1898,
when Gramsci was seven, he was accused of embezzlement and jailed, with
the result that the family was thrown into abject poverty. Gramsci, who had
had to leave school, eventually won a scholarship to study in Turin on the
Italian mainland in 1911.
His background as an immigrant from an impoverished peripheral island
with its own alien language would always mark his work with a perspective
that made it in some sense at odds with the Marxism that had been devel-
oped on the European mainland by intellectuals who were often, like Marx
or Lenin, countercultural bourgeoisie.6 It is for this reason therefore that in a
certain sense Gramsci came from outside “the West.”7 A native of the islands,
Gramsci was an intellectual from the peripheries, and in every sense “South-
ern.” He was a poor emigrant, an immigrant, and someone physically disabled
by accidental circumstance. Although in his day, emigration was primarily a
first-world issue (and immigration a problem for non-Western peoples), the
questions of minority existence—“assimilation, emancipation, separatism,
conversion, the language of state protection and minority rights, uprooting,
exile, and homelessness” (Mufti, Enlightenment in the Colony 2–3)—are those
of Gramsci himself. This was especially reinforced by his father’s immigrant
status in Sardinia, and his origins in the Italian colony (or variously semi-
colony) of Albania,8 a link that helps to account for Gramsci’s evident interest
in Albania and in Islam (between 40% and 70% of Albanians are Muslims).9
I
In Orientalism, Edward W. Said remarks in a footnote that the (then current
Gramsci 1971) English translation of Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks inexplicably
leaves out the fi nal sentence in the fi rst note to the “Preliminary Points on the
Il Gramsci meridionale 19
Study of Philosophy and the History of Culture”: “Occorre fare inizialmente
un tale inventario” (Gramsci, Quaderni 1376).10 The extraordinary inventory
of the textual fabric of European hegemony that Said made in Orientalism
was one product of Said’s reading of Gramsci, never before a reference in
his books. What was remarkable though was not that he had been reading
Gramsci, but that in a book concerned with the Orientalizing of the reality of
the East, he had spotted what got left out of Gramsci too. The early English
translations of Gramsci tended to Europeanize his work. The various selec-
tions leave the reader with little sense that Gramsci had any interest in the
world outside Europe, a perspective that reflects and illustrates the Eurocen-
trism of European Marxism itself in the 1970s and 80s.

Although not one of the major themes sketched out for the Notebooks, Gram-
sci’s internationalism is certainly apparent in the pre-prison writings and in the
twenty-nine prison notebooks that he wrote from 1929 until his death in 1937.
It is true that Gramsci makes no direct response to the major episodes in Ital-
ian colonialism before his incarceration, for example, the invasions of Libya
in 1911, Albania in 1915, or Turkey from 1919 to 1923, though he did offer a
revolutionary perspective on the future of the colonies in general (revolt and
emancipation—“Alla guerra europea non potrà molto tardare la guerra delle
colonie”) during the First World War (Gramsci, Cronache torinesi 255–58).11
Nevertheless, the non-Western world is visible, and evidently a point of inter-
est. Gramsci’s publications in L’Ordine Nuovo, for example, written towards
the end of the anti-imperial revolutionary ferment of 1914–1920, provide a
typical Leninist perspective on the revolt of the colonial populations against
their imperial-capitalist masters seen as a dialectic of oppressor and oppressed
nations (Gramsci, L’Ordine Nuovo 68–70, 396; Gramsci, Selections from Political
Writings, 1910–1920 155; Young, Postcolonialism 132).12 In “The Colonial Popu-
lations,” the widespread resistance that Gramsci describes as “the uprising of
the Moslem world against the European states” (L’Ordine Nuovo 563; SPW 1:
303) is linked to the ongoing resistance of the Albanians to the Italian occu-
pation of 1915: the article was published at the beginning of the Vlora War
( June–August 1920), at the end of which Italy withdrew and ceded sovereignty
(though Albania would be reoccupied by Italy during the Second World War).
Gramsci argues that there is a “hierarchy of exploitation”: capitalism exploits
the European working class, while imperialism enforces a secondary level of
exploitation of the colonial populations who provide the raw materials and
foodstuffs for Europe.
In this way the colonial populations become the foundation on which

the whole edifice of capitalist exploitation is erected. These populations
are required to donate the whole of their lives to the development of in-
dustrial civilization. For this they can expect no benefit in return; indeed
they see their own countries systematically despoiled of their natural
resources. (L’Ordine Nuovo 562; SPW 1: 302)
This chain of exploitation, it might be remarked, has not substantially
changed in contemporary arrangements of capitalism. Gramsci’s argument
here, which was made by Zinoviev and others in September of the same year
in the First Congress of the Peoples of the East held at Baku (Riddell, To See
the Dawn 77), is that far from being peripheral to revolutionary action, the
overthrow of capitalism should logically begin in the colonies: “By freeing
themselves of foreign capitalist exploitation, the colonial populations would
deprive the European industrial bourgeoisies of raw materials and foodstuffs,
and bring down the centres of civilization that have lasted from the fall of
the Roman empire till today” (Gramsci, SPW 1: 303). This, however, was not
an argument to which he would seriously return, even with respect to Italy’s

own internal “colony”—the Mezzogiorno. Very shortly after Gramsci pub-
lished his article on colonial populations, the Second Congress of the Third
International would convene in Moscow in July 1920, the Italian delegation
deeply divided in their different political ideologies (Riddell, Workers of the
World 1: 34–35). At the Second Congress, Lenin’s “Theses on the National
and Colonial Questions” would produce a different position on the colonies
from that expressed in Gramsci’s article, advocating guarded alliance with
bourgeois-progressive liberation movements, and affi rming the leading role
of the party and European proletariat in organizing the peasantry in colonial
countries in order jointly to overthrow capitalism and imperialism (Riddell,
Workers of the World 1: 283–90).
Notwithstanding Gramsci’s pamphlet advocating that the radical left
should stay within the PSI that was circulated at the Second Congress and
that won praise from Lenin, in January 1921 Gramsci allied with Amadeo
Bordiga who led the split from the PSI to found the Communist Party of Italy
(CPI), as it was originally called. Bordiga’s subsequent refusal of Lenin’s
directive to form an alliance or common front with the PSI resulted in Gram-
sci himself being nominated as the Italian delegate to the Comintern from
1922 to 1924. This meant that Gramsci was in Moscow during the period of
Mussolini’s March on Rome and the fascist accession to power, a develop-
ment which increased the urgency with which, at the Fourth Congress, the
need for a common front between communists and socialists was advocated.
Bordiga’s continuing resistance to the Third International’s demand would
eventually lead to the International nominating Gramsci as the new leader of
the CPI. Living through the Russian Revolution, Gramsci in certain respects
also can be seen as affi liated to the situation of anti-colonial revolutionaries
of that time, in particular, in negotiating the relation of the PCI to the poli-
cies being developed for international revolution by the Comintern. As the
Italian delegate to the Comintern, Gramsci was in a comparable position to
a range of anti-colonial activists, and faced with similar choices—namely, try-
ing to negotiate a position with regard to the Comintern, on the one hand,
and with his own party, on the other. Unlike M. N. Roy, Gramsci had a fully
constituted party back home to deal with, though in his case he disagreed
with the policies of the CPI leadership. After Bordiga’s arrest, the Comintern
effectively took over the organization of the party and nominated Gramsci as
its leader; Gramsci made strenuous efforts to persuade the PCI to come into
line with the orders for fusion with the socialists made by the Comintern,
as well as orientating the party more closely to general Comintern policy.
Although in his earlier writing, Gramsci was prepared to bend orthodoxy in
order to correlate with the specific local and national situation, as in his essay
“The Revolution Against ‘Capital’” (Scritti politici 1: 130 –33; SPW 1: 34–37),
after his return from Moscow he would follow the broad lines of Comintern
orthodoxy, albeit later developed in an original way with respect to his writ-
ings on Italian history and culture.

As one would expect from a member of the Comintern, serving on the
Latin American Secretariat of the Comintern under Trotsky (a connection
still visible in his interest in Latin America in the Prison Notebooks) Gram-
sci was seriously concerned with questions of imperialism and colonialism,
a preoccupation that remains evident in the Prison Notebooks. We fi nd him
analyzing Italian colonialism from the perspective of the former colony of
Albania, and commenting on British and American imperialism, the history
of Italian-English involvement in Ethiopia and Somalia, the Yemen, Egypt,
China, India, Palestine etc. (Quaderni 76, 68–70, 175–79, 186–88, 218–19,
582–84, 620–21, 635). Many of these entries take the form of discussions
of books or articles that Gramsci had been reading, rather than developing
independent arguments in the mode, for example, of his “History of the Sub-
altern Classes: Methodological Criteria.” But like the form of the Notebooks
themselves, they represent an important part of both his methodology and
his intellectual ambitions. For the most striking thing about the Notebooks,
when compared for example to other famous Notebook writers—such as Gide,
Gauguin, Leonardo da Vinci, Rilke’s The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge
or Césaire’s Notebook of a Return to the Native Land—is their remorselessly
detached, impersonal nature, their lack of self-doubt and self-reflection. The
Notebooks were, of course, intended to provide the basis for disinterested, für
ewig book projects. Nevertheless, they also deliberately take on in their own
way the form of the notebook genre. Gramsci did not plan one book after the
next, as he might have done if writing in the freedom of his own study, the
normal form of book production. In certain respects, his ambitious plan for
the notebooks was far more ill suited to the conditions of his incarceration.
He began from the fi rst to plan sixteen or so interrelated topics (the one that
he soon dropped was the only personal one, “Experiences of Prison Life”),
reduced in 1931 to ten. In this way, the twenty-nine notebooks represented
a deliberately fractured, multidisciplinary enterprise, moving at will from
history to literature to folklore to Fordism—an early practical example of the
broad perspective of what would become known as Cultural Studies. While
Gramsci was researching and writing his vast array of topics, he was at the
same time deliberately producing knowledge in a new way. The entries were
not merely a group of essays—they were constructed against each other, in
what might be termed a rough cut fashion, with Gramsci’s headings which
order the material by repeating certain phrases and categories neverthe-
less preserving and in certain respects augmenting the montage effect. The
jumps and moves enabled a formal heterogeneity that would otherwise have
been impossible with the result that, ever since their publication, scholars
have been arguing over the ways that they have been edited and translated.
At the same time, this has enabled Gramsci’s work to be used as a conceptual
resource in a manner comparable to few other left intellectuals: while the
drive was not to produce a totalizing theory, at the same time, the analysis
reaches out to the historical and political formations of society at an extraor-

dinary range of levels.
Why did Gramsci begin his prison writing on so many multiple fronts,
rather than simply think of writing one or more books in serial fashion,
as is the norm for most writers? The notebooks were planned as a kind of
total project, embodying Gramsci’s idea that, on the model of the French
Revolution, the revolution should be the product not simply of a vanguard-
ist party coup but of intellectual and cultural preparation: “[E]very revo-
lution has been preceded by a long process of intense critical activity, of
new cultural insight and the spread of ideas through groups of men ini-
tially resistant to them” (Pre-Prison Writings 10). In this “intense critical
activity,” we can see here a link to his “postcolonial” profi le. Until the
Russian Revolution, the nationalist unification of Italy was regarded in
colonial countries as offering one of the few contemporary examples of a
successful anti-colonial revolution. Mazzini figures prominently in the pan-
theon of anti-colonial activists; on the model of Mazzini’s Young Italy, we
fi nd Young Sardinia (discussed in Gramsci’s “The Southern Question”),
Young India, Young Ireland and many other comparable organizations.
The Italian nationalists were indeed engaging against empire—the Austro-
Hungarian run by the Hapsburgs, together with the various kingdoms and
Papal States, which made up the rest of the Italian peninsula—and for this
reason Mazzini’s nationalism continued to be a major inspiration for anti-
colonial struggle. From this perspective, Gramsci was, in a technical sense,
a postcolonial political activist and intellectual. His experience of living in
a fragile democracy that was quickly turned into a right-wing dictatorship
in which leftist intellectuals and politicians were jailed for sedition closely
resembles in many ways the all too common postcolonial situation of many
former colonies. It was common for anti-colonial intellectuals to combine
practical political work with more reflective writing composed or devel-
oped in jail, and so too Gramsci’s active political involvement, organizing
and developing practical strategies, strategic tactics, was combined with
reflective critical cultural analysis in the Prison Notebooks. By investigating
historical formations in the past, Gramsci builds on the possibilities of how
to develop counter-hegemonic strategies that will provide the basis for an
alternative subaltern state. But what profound question was the untotalized
project of the Prison Notebooks supposed to answer?
II
Gramsci’s interest in colonialism was derived directly from his early life in
Sardinia, from his personal experience of the Italian dialectic of coloniza-
tion and emigration, but was mediated intellectually by his membership of
the Comintern and the PCI. His major discussion of these questions from
an Italian perspective comes in his 1926 essay “Alcuni temi sulla questione
meridionale,” “Some Aspects of the Southern Question” (in Lo Stato operaio

9–26). Among postcolonial critics, Gramsci is sometimes praised for raising
the issue of the Southern Question, as if his choosing to consider North–
South relations represented an original intervention and an advanced, pre-
emptively postcolonial understanding for someone on the left in his period.
Certainly it looks unusual within the general paradigm of European Marx-
ism, but far less so for any Italian Marxist when one considers the role of the
Southern Question in the history of Italian politics. The “questione meridion-
ale” was a perennial question after unification, and one broached by a wide
variety of thinkers from left and right—such as Eugenio Aziomonti, Guido
Dorso, Giustino Fortunato, Arturo Labriola, Enrico Leone, Ernest Cesare
Longobardi, Sidney Sonnino, Leopoldo Franchetti, Francesco Saverio Nitti,
Gaetano Salvemini as well as Gramsci himself.13 Coming from Sardinia, in
the Italian “South,” Gramsci had in a sense been writing about the Southern
Question all his life —indeed the hardships and injustices produced by the
Southern question were what had directly precipitated him into politics in
the fi rst place.
Symptomatically it was the Southern Question that remained an open
question at the moment of Gramsci’s arrest. The inadvertently fragmented
sentence highlighted by Edward Said mimics a more famous and striking
fragment in Gramsci’s writings—the last sentence of the unfi nished manu-
script left behind on his arrest:
This [work] is gigantic and difficult, but precisely worthy of every sacrifice
. . . on the part of those intellectuals (and there are many of them, more
than is believed) from North and South—who have understood that only
two social forces are essentially national and bearers of the future: the
proletariat and the peasants. (Scritti politici 3: 265; SPW 1: 462)
The three coordinates of this sentence—the intellectuals of the North and

South, the proletariat and the peasants, whose union forms the difficult and
gigantic political work that Gramsci envisages as the future of the Italian
nation—form the very center of the political nexus around which Grams-
ci’s work revolved. It was not by chance that he had been writing on the
Southern Question when he was arrested at his home on the Via G. Bat-
tista Morgagni in Rome on November 8, 1926. The essay, as Giuseppe Fiore
observes, “marks a transition from the journalism of [Gramsci’s] early years
of political struggle to the more meditative style of the prison writings” (Fiore
208). According to the editorial note when the essay was fi rst published in
1930, the essay was being written for a new party journal for a series in which
current key ideological and political issues would be broached (Gramsci,
“Alcuni temi sulla questione meridionale” 9). The reason for that new tone
of reflection in the deteriorating political situation of the autumn of 1926
is clear: as Mariátegui had pointed out the year before, in some respects,
it was the Italian Socialist and Communist parties’ failure to provide an

adequate formulation of how to solve the problem of the Southern Question
that enabled the political developments of the ascent of fascism, the very pro-
cess that would result in Gramsci’s arrest. The gigantic and difficult task of
the Prison Notebooks was essentially designed to solve the problem with which
Gramsci was preoccupied in “The Southern Question”: how to produce a
new form of cultural hegemony that would bring together the workers of the
North with the peasants of the South in a socialist political formation.
The Southern Question, and the uneven development of the Italian
economy, had been at the center of Italian politics since reunification in
1861, and a central preoccupation for all Italian politicians, including the
socialists and revolutionary syndicalists, some of whom went on to support
the fascist party after 1919. As early as 1902 Arturo Labriola had created a
splinter group within the Italian Socialist Party (PSI), to be known as the
revolutionary syndicalists, challenging the PSI on the grounds that fi rst,
socialist revolution could only come through the organization of the work-
ing class into syndicates that could take over the process of production,
and second that the socialists had focused exclusively on, and drew their
support from, the industrial proletariat of the North at the expense of major-
ity of the population, particularly the Southern peasantry who were being
forced by economic deprivation, as Gramsci put it, “to emigrate in order to
survive” (SPW 1: 57). The revolutionary syndicalists, who fi nally split with
the reformist and parliamentary PSI in 1907, drew support from Southern
intellectuals based in Naples, particularly Enrico Leone and Ernest Cesare
Longobardi. The importance of including the peasantry meant that Labri-
ola and Leone began to revise Marx for the fi rst time on what would now be
called a third-world basis—anticipating Mao’s relocation of the revolution-
ary subject to the peasantry—although in their case, what they sought was
rather the synthesis of the Northern industrial proletariat with the Southern
peasantry—exactly what Gramsci was still trying to do in 1926. Syndical-
ist organization of strikes in Italy achieved some success, but they were
trumped in political terms by the creation of Enrico Corradini’s nationalist
party, the Associazione Nazionale Italiana (ANI) in 1910 which advocated war
as the solution to the alleged sickness of an Italy saddled with the system of
liberal parliamentary democracy (the left and right alike in Italy, including
Gramsci’s later formed CPI, shared this aversion to “bourgeois” democracy).
The nationalists focused their attention on the land closest to Italy across the
Mediterranean that was part of the Ottoman Empire. The expansion of Italy
into a colony further south would, Corradini argued, at once reinvigorate
the nation through war, and solve the problem of peasant poverty by giving
them new lands to which to migrate: as Gramsci described it in terms which
bring out the discursive complexity of the era, “the Libyan war appeared to
a whole layer of intellectuals as the beginning of the ‘great proletariat’s’ offen-
sive against the capitalist and plutocratic world” (Scritti politici 3: 253; SPW 2:
450). In the Prison Notebooks Gramsci offered what was in effect a critique of
the nationalist rationale of the Libyan and later colonial wars to facilitate
emigration. He argued that there was no necessary link between a colony
and emigrants from the associated metropole. With respect to colonization
the economic factor was always primary: it was not the export of people
that produced colonies, it was the export of capital (Gramsci, Quaderni 986;
Gramsci, Prison Notebooks 3: 279; Liguori and Voza 145). Certainly the fascist
Italian government invested a large amount of capital in Libya, but this was
largely in support of its role as a settler colony. Over the period 1912 to 1943
about 100,000 Italians emigrated to Libya, which by 1939 was officially des-
ignated as simply a part of Italy, its “fourth shore” (Quarta Sponda). Today,
of course, the flow has been reversed, but the boastful claims that Libya was
part of “Greater Italy” have been long forgotten in Italy, even if in certain
respects they still remain part of the Libyan imaginary.
The syndicalists, strongly influenced by the antimilitarism of Georges
Sorel, for the most part supported the general resistance on the left to the
Libyan war which began in 1911, and in the course of which Italy appropri-
ated three North African provinces from the Ottoman Empire. The most
vociferous of these was a socialist leader who rose to prominence on account
of his vociferous opposition to colonial warfare: Benito Mussolini. The Lib-
yan war, though popular in the South, did not transform Italy as a nation: it
was the Great War which Italy joined in 1915 on the Allied side, in the face
of sustained opposition from socialists and communists, that succeeded in
transforming the Italian political climate so as to produce a political and
ideological coalition of “national socialism” between the nationalists, who
were advocating a “proletarian nationalism,” and some of the revolutionary
syndicalists, led by Mussolini (Sternhell). In 1915 Mussolini had abandoned
his earlier position and began to advocate Italian participation in the war (as
a result of which he was fi rst, expelled from the Italian Socialist party, and
second, generously funded by the British MI5 [Kington]); by 1919 he had
founded the Italian fascist party, the Fasci di Combattimento. In the postwar
environment, the fusion of nationalism and syndicalism in fascism offered
a rival, and politically much more successful, response to the increasingly
chaotic political situation in Italy that began with the Biennio Rosso years of
1919–1920. For fascism succeeded in appearing to be at once elitist and popu-
lar, pro-capitalism and pro-workers and peasantry, modern and traditional,
totalitarian and anti-collectivist (Roberts).
By 1926, with Mussolini effectively dictator, and initiating agricultural
reforms, new model agricultural communities in Sardinia and Sicily, and
other measures such as government subsidies designed to increase agricul-
tural production and improve the lot of the peasantry, Gramsci’s political
and intellectual problem was fi rst that attempted solutions to the problems
of the economic and political disparities between North and South had been
a central focus in Italian politics for decades—his own analysis begins in
1894—and second that solutions offered by nationalists, and former socialist

syndicalists who had become national socialists, had been politically success-
ful in so far as they were now in power.
Gramsci’s analysis of the Southern Question is somewhat skewed by his
discussion of Syndicalism and his claim that it was supported by the South-
ern peasantry. Gramsci tends to conflate all syndicalists from different gen-
erations, often of very different tendencies, together, a habit facilitated by the
fact that in Italian sindacato and its derivatives can be used “for both trade
union, trade unionism and trade unionist and syndicalism and syndicalist”
(Gramsci, Pre-Prison Writings xl). He claims that the revolutionary Syndical-
ist leaders were all drawn from the South:
Syndicalism was born: the instinctive, elemental, primitive but healthy

expression of working-class reaction against the bloc with the bourgeoi-
sie and in favour of a bloc with the peasants, and first and foremost with the
Southern peasants. Precisely that. Indeed, in a certain sense, syndicalism
is a weak attempt on the part of the Southern peasants, represented by
their most advanced intellectuals, to lead the proletariat. (Scritti politici
3: 253; SPW 2: 450)
This is true for some (the Leone and Longobardi circle in Naples), but
it does not take into account the role of the anarcho-syndicalism of the
Unione Sindacale Italiana (USI), which in many ways was to the left of
the PCI (Levy, Gramsci and the Anarchists). Gramsci describes the “essen-
tial ideology” of syndicalism as a “new liberalism,” but syndicalism was
really too diverse to have an essential ideology. In fact the USI itself did
not consider that the peasantry of the South constituted its support base,
and Gramsci was mistaken in supposing that this was the case (Roberts
53–54). Carl Levy observes,
It is misleading for Gramsci to reduce syndicalist intellectuals to mere

spokespersons for the interests of southern peasants. Indeed southern syn-
dicalist intellectuals of the ‘fi rst generation’ uncritically embraced the
modernity of the industrial north and their fi rst base was Milan. For
them the salvation of Italy lay in the modernization process pioneered in
the North. (Levy, “Currents of Italian Syndicalism Before 1926” 228)
This position is in many respects similar to Gramsci’s own. There is not

space here to go into a detailed discussion of the complex question of Gram-
sci’s views on the USI and Italian syndicalism. For our purposes, the impor-
tant issues are in the fi rst place the questions that arose from the fact that
Gramsci considered the North–South relation to be a colonial one (though
he was by no means the fi rst to suggest that it constituted a form of internal
colonialism),14 and second, the extent to which this can be considered pro-
ductive from a postcolonial perspective.
III
The Southern Question is at once anti-colonial and colonial—about the colo-
nial submission of the South to the North, and associated emigration from the
peripheral parts of the metropole to another colony. The irony with respect to
Gramsci’s observation that the relation between the “nordici” and the “sudici”
was essentially a colonial relation was that this was a perverse state of affairs
considering that the South had formerly been part of the independent King-
dom of the two Sicilies. Until unification and the industrialization of the North,
the South was by far the richest of the Italian states. In the two Sicilies there
was extensive resistance to unification, with revolts (beginning in the 1860s)
and brigandage—brigantaggio postunitario—being heavily suppressed by the new
Italian state and continuing up to the time of Mussolini. Many in the South
certainly saw unification as a form of colonial occupation by the northern Pied-
montese, that is, by the Kingdom of Sardinia (“Regno Sabaudo” or “Regno
di Sardegna”). If the South was in a colonial relation to the North, then that
North included the “Southern” island of Sardinia that was nominally its cen-
ter. At this point, the degree to which Gramsci was not dealing with a simple
colonial relation vis-à-vis the Italian North and South becomes clear: if the
South had been an actual colony, the obvious solution would have been inde-
pendent sovereignty, and an attempt to develop national and economic auton-
omy—freedom—from the exploiting power. This would be the case for the two
Sicilies, which had formerly been a sovereign autonomous state. Unification
having been driven by the Kingdom of Sardinia, which formed the basis for
the subsequent Italian state, meant on the other hand that technically Sardinia
was the colonial not the colonized power—it was in the name of the Kingdom
of Sardinia that Garibaldi had led “the thousand” to conquer the Kingdom of
the Two Sicilies in 1860. On the other hand, within the Kingdom of Sardinia
it was also the case that since the incorporation of the Republic of Genova in
1814, and with the capital in Torino, Piedmont had become the centre of politi-
cal and economic power, with the result that the island of Sardinia became
increasingly peripheral, particularly after unification and the industrialization
of the North. At this point, a Sardinian nationalism developed seeking auton-
omy for the island—from the very united Italy that had originated in the King-
dom of Sardinia itself.15 For both Sardinia and the Mezzogiorno (formerly the
Kingdom of Two Sicilies), therefore, this new “colonial” relation with the North
was the result of the complex processes of Italian unification. Paradoxically
“colonial” oppression was instituted not by colonialism but by the creation of
the independent Italian state. Although early in his life, Gramsci had in fact
supported the nationalist movement in Sardinia, he rejects this explicitly in
“The Southern Question” on the grounds that it would perpetuate the current
structure of ruling-class exploitation. The only alternative solution therefore
was not autonomy but more integration with the North. On this, at least, all
Italian political parties, whether of the Left or the Right, were agreed. The
claimed “solutions” to the Southern Question that had already been institut-
ed—the invasion of Libya and its creation as a settler colony, the development
of nationalist war—were both, as Gramsci points out in his essay, supported by
some intellectuals and even the peasantry of the South. His work, therefore,
was to develop an alternative socialist model in which the Southerners could
be led by the more politically progressive communist intellectuals and prole-
tariat of the North. The struggle was to produce a strategy that would produce
a counter-hegemony to that which had already been established by Mussolini.
The formation of that programme was essentially the task Gramsci undertook
in the huge—“gigantic and difficult”— project of The Prison Notebooks.
As we have seen, Gramsci’s own position on the Southern Question had
changed and developed over the years. By the time of his 1916 essay, “Il Mez-
zogiorno e la guerra” (in Cronache torinesi 228–31) Sardinian nationalism had
been rejected in favor of the abolition of unfair trade tariffs (a widely favored
solution to the colonial market arrangements then in place), and a general
socialist transformation of Italian society as a whole. By 1920, in L’Ordine
Nuovo, Gramsci had developed the basis for his mature position that would
be nuanced, but not radically transformed in the 1926 essay:
The Northern bourgeoisie has subjugated the South of Italy and the
Islands, and reduced them to exploitable colonies; by emancipating
itself from capitalist slavery, the Northern proletariat will emancipate
the Southern peasant masses enslaved to the banks and the parasitic
industry of the North. The economic and political regeneration of
the peasants should not be sought in the division of uncultivated or
poorly cultivated lands, but in the solidarity of the industrial prole-
tariat. That in turn needs the solidarity of the peasantry. (L’Ordine
Nuovo 377; SPW 1: 148)
While in 1920 Gramsci still considered the proletariat the only political power
which could oppose the bourgeois state (L’Ordine Nuovo 473), here the major
question of how to effect a double solidarity, between proletariat and peasantry,
is already raised but characteristically left unanswered. In true international-
ist spirit, Gramsci seeks an alliance between the working class of the North
and the peasantry of the South, with the former the vanguard of the latter, a
position essentially compatible with the Comintern’s policy to be developed
for the colonies—while the Comintern supported their liberation, they were
always to be led by the working class of the North. The strategic difference
from the colonial scenario was that, since they all lived in the same country,
the value of the peasantry as pre-revolutionary agents lay in their sheer weight
of numbers which made it conceivable that they would be able to destroy the
military might of the bourgeois state and so facilitate the revolution of the
workers in the city (L’Ordine Nuovo 474; SPW 1: 180). In the situation of 1926,
Gramsci’s strategy was to re-imagine the possibility of a productive solidarity,
intellectual and material, between proletariat and peasant, and to envisage a
change in the intellectual leadership of the South from conservative Southern
to revolutionary Northern intellectuals. In the “Southern Question” essay, so
far as it goes, Gramsci’s position, whereby the leadership would be delivered
by a Northern working class via the mediation of the intellectuals was, how-
ever, in its way somewhat colonial, since the peasantry is ostensibly offered
little agency or activity beyond political re-education that would help them to
abandon their folkloric beliefs—senso comune—for a properly scientific outlook—
senso buono. It is in this context that the development of the idea in the Prison
Notebooks of resistant “subaltern classes” beyond the narrow definition of the
(Northern) proletariat and the apathetic lawlessness of Southern sovversivismo
(Levy, “‘Sovversivismo’”)—marks a major move in Gramsci’s thinking. Much
broader than the peasantry, the idea of subaltern or subversive groups allows
Gramsci the possibility of thinking through how the necessary North–South
alliance could be formed beyond the narrow concept of a leadership of the
latter by the former. Having established the solidarity of different subaltern
groups, Gramsci’s increasing emphasis on the role of the intellectual was the
result of an increasing conviction that the radical hegemonic alliance of North
and South could only be produced through the mediation of “organic” intel-
lectuals. Gramsci speaks of solidarity, not of unity or homogeneity. He never
sought to resolve the differences between North and South other than the
economic ones. His emphasis on the importance of the continuing regional
fragmentation of Italy can be compared to the situation of many postcolonial
nations. For what was widely regarded as the central political problem for Italy
was that it had unified as a state, but remained disparate as a nation and as a
people, full of cultural and economic imbalances. As a communist, Gramsci
does not follow the nationalist idea of arguing for cultural or linguistic homog-
enization, but rather sees the economic disparity as the key and that imbalance
as a threat to the cultural autonomy of different regions whose differences,
beginning with his interest in Sard dialectics, he continues to support (Ives).
There is no mention of subalternity in Gramsci’s “Southern Ques-
tion” essay, only of different social strata. The concept of subalternity was
invented in the Prison Notebooks as a way of describing the operation of
different social strata or groups that had historically produced hegemonic
political formations (Gramsci continues to refer to the proletariat [“classe
operaia”]). Aside from Notebook 25, “Ai margini della storia (Storia dei
gruppi sociali subalterni)” (Quaderni 2279–94), there are only eight other
references to subaltern classes in the Prison Notebooks (Quaderni 328–32,
897, 1320, 1349, 1387–88, 1607, 1663–64, 1696).16 In Notebook 25, Gram-
sci uses the term to describe the lower classes in pre-capitalist societies,
and all classes that struggle against the state, including even the bourgeoi-
sie; elsewhere, at one point, “subaltern classes” includes all lower classes
including the working class as well as the “most marginal and peripheral
elements,” groups who have not yet come to class consciousness (Quad-
erni 328–32; Prison Notebooks 2: 48–52); once Gramsci uses the term as a
description of the “humble” struggling against the “powerful” (Quaderni
897; Prison Notebooks 3: 197); at one point in general terms of dominant ver-
sus subaltern classes (Quaderni 1320); once to describe the popular masses
in general (1664); and once as a description of those classes “who have no
history” (1696). In a significant difference from the later Subaltern Studies
historians, Gramsci never uses the term in direct connection to, or as a
specific description of, the peasantry, who are always characterized simply
as “contadini.” Of course the peasantry would form part of the account
of the humble classes, but they are not foregrounded in any way in that
account, even if they are privileged in Gramsci’s own analysis of the con-
temporary political situation of Italy still caught up in the imbalances of
the Southern Question.
Gramsci’s idea of an alliance of the intellectuals and the peasantry, led
by the dirigente working class, brings home just how far the later Subal-
tern Studies historians shifted Gramsci’s formulations. Whereas Gramsci
sought to bring the proletariat together with the peasantry to educate the
peasantry out of the dominant ideology of nationalist narratives, Subaltern
Studies was written not only against dominant nationalist accounts but
also Marxist narratives of the role of the proletariat in Indian history. With
their Maoist/Naxalite genealogy, the Subaltern Studies historians sought
to establish not unity with the working class but a relative autonomy for
the peasantry—an autonomy that Gramsci by contrast never allows the
subaltern classes (Quaderni 2286). For Gramsci’s project was in a sense the
very opposite of that of the Subaltern Studies historians—his aim, made
very clear in “The Southern Question,” was precisely to bring the peas-
antry together with the proletariat into a mutual coalition for a Marxist
historical narrative that would effect social and political transformation in
the future, rather than to celebrate their independent political spontane-
ity or singular forms of resistance. Gramsci’s larger political aim mapped
out in “The Southern Question” forms the testimony of a man who envis-
aged the intellectuals, proletariat and peasantry working together to bring
about a fundamental political emancipation for the country as a whole.
There is something very “Southern” about that too.
Coda: Spivak and “the Subaltern”

We might also note here a further significant postcolonial transformation.
In her well-known critique of the Subaltern Studies methodology (Spivak,
“Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography”), Gayatri C. Spivak
not only deconstructs the Subaltern Studies pursuit of a collective peasant
class consciousness, but at the same time shifts Gramsci himself still further
than the Subaltern Studies group had already done. In a sense, it was Spi-
vak, not Gramsci, who invented “the subaltern.” The subaltern appears only
once as a singular figure (“il subalterno”) in the Prison Notebooks, where the
term describes someone who in historical terms was once an object but has
become a historical subject, a protagonist (Quaderni 1388).17 As an in many
ways fairly orthodox Marxist trained by the Comintern, Gramsci refers oth-
erwise to “classi subalterne” or “gruppi sociali subalterni,” subaltern classes
and subaltern social groups. In Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency, Rana-
jit Guha does use the term subaltern in the singular a couple of times when
he discusses ideas that apply to the peasant generically, but as Spivak points
out, the drive is not to retrieve individual consciousness but that of the class,
the peasantry as such. Spivak’s innovative move that created the singular
figure of the subaltern as an individual consciousness as well as being part
of a group, was allied to her other critique of the Subaltern Studies collec-
tive, namely, the absence of consideration of “the figure of woman” or “the
subaltern as sexed-subject” (Spivak, ”Subaltern Studies” 365, 357). While
in Marxism, it remains mandatory to analyze the class rather than the indi-
vidual, Spivak’s whole intervention with respect to feminism was that, when
put in an international frame, there is no such thing as women’s or woman’s
consciousness in general on the model of class consciousness; women are
politically heterogeneous and hierarchized across class, race, ethnic lines.
Gramsci does in fact consider explicitly whether women constitute a sub-
altern class, but though he acknowledges the similarity, he concludes that
“‘masculinity’ can be compared to class domination only in a certain sense;
it therefore has greater importance for the history of customs than for politi-
cal and social history” (Quaderni 302, 2286; Prison Notebooks 2: 24). By con-
trast, in “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (1985), Spivak defi nitively introduces
the singular figure of the subaltern woman. While the discussion of sati is
always generic, nevertheless the very theatre of immolation means that the
focus will always remain on the consciousness of the individual woman—we
cannot expect to fi nd a generic class consciousness among satis here. Yet Spi-
vak’s point is that in terms of her being impossibly placed between nationalist
and liberal colonial discourses, here it is the singular “figure of woman” who
disappears. The incarnation of the subaltern as a woman who individually
makes a choice—a choice of course enforced by her being a woman as
such—is then defi nitively engendered with the concluding story of the suicide
of Bhuvaneswari Bhaduri. With the haunting narration of Bhuvaneswari’s
death, the subaltern—the “historically muted subject of the non-elite (‘subal-
tern’) woman in the imperialist theater”—was produced for the fi rst time as
an historical agent (Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” 120). At this point it
becomes clear that Spivak’s account in fact in a certain sense remains close
to the spirit of Gramsci’s single use of the term “subaltern” in the singular—
someone who in historical terms was once an object but has become a his-
torical subject, a protagonist—even if this singular figure has now begun to
eclipse the idea of the subaltern as a class. Since Spivak’s intervention, the
subaltern has been transformed into a new and powerful paradigm for our
class-wary times, showing how subaltern singularity can enact a disjunctive
politics of belonging through its acts of insubordination and insurrection.
This contemporary emphasis on the subaltern has nevertheless come a long
way from Gramsci himself, who remains fi rmly anchored to the political pos-
sibilities offered by the construction of hegemony through the articulation of
the subaltern classes.
Notes
1. Gramsci, L’Ordine Nuovo 422, my translation. Citations to Gramsci’s works are
fi rst to the Italian edition, followed by the English translation, where available.
2. Gramsci’s The Modern Prince (1957) was the fi rst book by Gramsci to be published
in English. The fi rst translation into English was the single essay, “Benedetto
Croce and His Concept of Liberty. Notes on Croce’s History of Europe (Storia
d’Europa) taken from Prison Letters,” Science & Society 10.3 (1946), 283–92.
3. The Sardinian language was only officially recognized in 1999.
4. On Gramsci and the Sardinian language(s), see Ives 2004.
5. http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?res=F70B16FF3B59157493CB
A9178DD85F418584F9 [accessed March 23, 2011]
6. In his class background, and in his interests in the role of dialects and minor
languages in his own region, Gramsci had more in common with Joseph Stalin,
both of them marked by small physical stature and disabilities.
7. At the same time, it is clear that his knowledge of the world outside Europe
is sometimes limited. For example, he criticizes Aldous Huxley’s critique of
British educational policy in India where Huxley suggests that it was a mistake
to put all the effort into education addressed to Brahmin and Chattrya castes
rather than primary school teachers. Gramsci responds by saying that this intel-
lectual elite needed to be trained fi rst precisely so that primary schools could
be developed with suitable teachers. This would work as an idea for Italy, but
Gramsci evidently has little sense that few Brahmins would consider becoming
primary school teachers in India, especially public schools that would be popu-
lated by the lower castes (Gramsci, Quaderni 709).
8. Gramsci, Lettere dal carcere 506.
9. E.g., Gramsci Scritti politici 3, 261; SPW 2: 458. On Islam, see Gramsci, Quaderni
246–48, 621–23.
10. Said, Orientalism 25, 329–30. Said does not point out that the sentence, however,
was already present in the fi rst 1957 US translation of Gramsci, The Modern
Prince 59.
11. Translation, “The European war must soon be followed by the war of the
colonies.”
12. The two volumes of Gramsci’s Selections from Political Writings will hereafter be
referred to as SPW 1 and SPW 2.
13. This is not the place for a full discussion of the history of the Southern question
in Italy. For an extensive selection of writings on the topic, see Villari.
14. Compare, for example, Antonio de Viti de Marco, La questione meridionale (1903)
in Villari 343–53.
15. The current independence party in Sardinia is the Indipendèntzia Repùbrica de

Sardigna (IRS).
16. This count does not allow for sections repeated across different notebooks.
17. Gramsci also uses the term in the singular in a somewhat problematic way
in a letter to his wife Julia ( Julca) written 8 August 1933, where he worries
about their son reading Uncle Tom’s Cabin without someone situating for him the
book’s religiosity and emotions in their historical context. He does not consider
Julia as the person who is able to do this, remarking that: “In general, however,
it seems to me that you put yourself (and not only in this connection) in the posi-
tion of the subaltern rather than that of the leader [nella posizione del subalterno e
non del dirigente], that is, of one who is not in a position of historically criticizing
ideologies by dominating them, explaining and justifying them as a histori-
cal necessity of the past, but of one who, brought into contact with a specific
world of emotions, feels attracted or repulsed by it, remaining always within
the sphere of emotion and immediate passion” (translation modified; Letters,
ed. Rosengarten, vol. 2, 318). Although there is no intrinsic reference to gender
in this remark, the inference remains that as a woman she remains in the pas-
sive subaltern realm of being dominated by emotion and passion rather than
operating as an agent or intellectual who can explain the ideological function
of such emotions in art. Gramsci himself, it is implied, has by contrast made the
transition from a subaltern dominated by the passions to the position of a lead-
ing critical intellectual.
2 Provincializing the Italian
Reading of Gramsci
Paolo Capuzzo and Sandro Mezzadra
The “Italian reading of Gramsci” this chapter seeks to provincialize is deeply

rooted in the political and intellectual history of the country after the Second
World War. The reading of Gramsci was never a neutral scholarly exercise in
Italy. His thought was always part of the stakes in the elaboration and discussion
of the peculiar politics of the Communist Party. Gramsci was “appropriated” by
the Party (particularly by its leadership gathered around its secretary Palmiro
Togliatti) soon after the end of the war, and his reading (as well as the editorial
work around his unpublished works) became a cornerstone in the building
of an “imagined continuity” of the history and politics of the party since its
foundation in 1921. For long time, dealing with Gramsci meant dealing with
this political stake in Italy. And it should not be surprising that in the early
1960s, while Gramsci began to “travel” and to nurture creative and heterodox
intellectual and political projects in different parts of the world, the break with
Communist orthodoxy in Italy often expressed itself in the form of a break
with Gramsci. Mario Tronti was actually referring to this point when he wrote
in 1959 that the author of the Prison Notebooks had to be considered a “typically
Italian thinker”;1 he was also setting the agenda for the years to come. This
chapter aims at reconstructing (and deconstructing) the history of the “Italian
reading of Gramsci” since the end of the Second World War (first section). The
second section discusses the ways in which one of the most significant Marxist
heresies in Italy, “workerism,” dealt with this Gramsci reading tradition. The
third section examines the ways in which, with the political defeat of the Italian
Communist Party at the end of the 1970s and then its dissolution in 1991, Gramsci
“came back home” and a new season of Gramsci studies in Italy began. The
discovery of the world relevance of his thought and the very relation of Gramsci
to the Italian context began to be investigated in new ways. The fourth and last
section discusses some of the issues at stake in recent developments of Italian
Gramsci studies and outlines a research agenda for the near future.
In the Shadow of Togliatti

In March 1944, after eighteen years in exile, Togliatti came back to Italy
and gave a boost to a new course in the history of the Italian Communist
Provincializing the Italian Reading of Gramsci 35
Party (PCI), the so-called svolta di Salerno, “the turning point of Salerno.”
The new strategy gave priority to the anti-fascist battle rather than to the
proletarian revolution and delayed the solution of the institutional settlement
of Italy, which meant the acceptance of the monarchy, at least temporarily.
Moreover, Togliatti introduced two major novelties in the long term strategy
of the Communist Party: he abandoned the Leninist model of a revolution-
ary cadre party for a modern mass party (the so-called partito nuovo, “new
party”); the communists accepted the constitutional ground of democratic
pluralism and parliamentary democracy, actively participating in drafting
and approving the new constitution which came into force in 1948. This was
a significant change compared to the cultural and political roots of commu-

nism in the 1920s, a change that reflected the political experience of Togliatti
in the 1930s and 1940s. Togliatti’s conception of the “new party,” gained
through his experiences in the popular fronts in the Spanish Civil War and
through the analysis of fascism as a modern political mass phenomenon, 2
also responded to the need to fi nd an area of autonomy from the Soviet
policy, despite a clear commitment to the Eastern bloc in terms of major
international choices.
The emphasis on the national character of the Party (which changed its
name from PCd’I, Partito Comunista d’Italia, “Communist Party of Italy,” to
PCI, Partito Comunista Italiano, “Italian Communist Party”), and the “progres-
sive democracy” as the pivot of the PCI strategy were far removed from the
revolutionary internationalism of the early 1920s and paralleled the Stalinist
doctrine of the national character of popular movements. These features
constituted the peculiar history of Italian communism after the war. This
new politics was accompanied by a vigorous cultural policy and by a histo-
riography that relied on two defi ning elements: the history of the PCI was
read, against any reasonable analysis, as a continuous development—without
contradictions— since its founding in Livorno in 1921; the pillar that sus-
tained this tradition was the figure of Antonio Gramsci. In the cultural policy
promoted by Togliatti, Gramsci became the figure around which to build the
history and tradition of the Italian Communist Party. This move proved to
be particularly suitable in order to attract young antifascist intellectuals who
had not yet joined the Communist Party. This operation—which did not hesi-
tate to make use of omissions and outright falsification of Gramsci’s work—
made Gramsci into a figure of the national culture that went beyond his
militancy in the Party of which he had been leader and founder. The image
of Gramsci in the works of Piero Gobetti and Guido Dorso, representatives of
Italian radical-democratic liberalism, appreciated Gramsci despite different
political affi liations, and even a famous sentence by Benedetto Croce, who
wrote of Gramsci “as a man of thought he was one of ours,” helped to make
of the work of Gramsci a national heritage and represented a crucial trait of
union between national history and that of the Party (Croce 86).
The fi rst Italian edition of Lettere dal carcere [Letters from Prison] pub-
lished in 1947, 3 which won a prestigious literary prize, already shows all
36 Paolo Capuzzo and Sandro Mezzadra
the characteristics of the editorial policy through which the Communist
Party made Gramsci’s work known in the following years. These letters
highlighted the human side of Gramsci and they assumed a paradigmatic
meaning of the violence suffered by all those who had the courage to vigor-
ously oppose the Fascist regime. Thus, the most private and personal work
of Gramsci was the fi rst to see the light after the war and become a monu-
ment to antifascism. These letters, which touched the whole country, were
censored by the Party, for all references to the “heretics” of international
communism in the 1920s, Bordiga, Trotsky, and even Rosa Luxemburg
as well as the entire Left opposition within the PCd’I, were removed from
them.4 In a book of 1951, coordinated by Togliatti, 5 which sketched a his-

tory of the Italian Communist Party on the thirtieth anniversary of its birth,
all the “dissidents,” both Right and Left, who punctuated the history of the
Communist Party of Italy were concealed, removed, or attacked with vio-
lence, so that an enduring standard of the history of the Party, centered on
the figures of Gramsci and Togliatti, was established.6 In the work plan pre-
pared by Togliatti, the manipulative and propagandistic intent was clear.
Togliatti wrote, among other things, “Make sure, of course, not to present
objectively the infamous doctrines of Bordiga.7 Do that in a critical and
destructive way” (qtd. in Liguori 271).
The fi rst publication of the Prison Notebooks, the thematic edition published
between 1948 and 1951, falls within the framework described so far and its
composition, which did not follow any philological criteria, responded to cul-
tural policy pursued by the party.8 The identification of the Crocian tradition
as the strong tradition of Italian intellectual history, 9 which the Communist
Party had to undermine, promoted the reading of Gramsci’s work on specific
aspects, such as the interpretation of national history and the literary and
artistic Italian tradition. This reading of Gramsci became mainstream in
the postwar decades. It paradoxically led to the acceptance of the battlefield
chosen by the opponent, that is, by the intellectuals inspired by Croce. Thus,
texts crucial for understanding Italian society, which in the 1950s and 1960s
experienced tumultuous processes of urbanization and industrialization,
remained at the edge of the Gramscian reception. The notebook “American-
ism and Fordism,” for example, which contained some of the sharpest pages
written in prison by Gramsci, received marginal attention until the 1970s.10
The thematic edition of the Notebooks was also intended to partially defuse
the subversive potential of Gramscian thought in relation to the Soviet doc-
trine. Togliatti had immediately realized this question as he began to read
the Notebooks, so much so that he wrote to Dimitrov in 1941:
Gramsci’s notebooks, which I have studied almost entirely, contain ma-

terials that can be used only after careful preparation. Without this treat-
ment the material cannot be used and even some parts, if they were used
in their current form, may not be useful to the party. For this I think it
is necessary that this material remain in our fi les to be developed here.
(qtd. in Vacca, “Togliatti” 144–45)
The key elements of the partito nuovo of Togliatti, namely the acceptance of a
pluralist democratic system and the mass party, can be hardly brought back
to Gramsci’s thought or, at the very least, this requires a historicization of
his work on those subjects which have undergone significant shifts in time.
Gramsci had a Leninist view of the party and when he spoke of democ-
racy he did not refer to parliamentary democracy. But this same relationship
between Gramsci and Togliatti, presented as harmonious and inspired by a
continuity of common purposes, actually knew moments of heavy contrast

just in a fatal moment in the history of world communism. On October 14,
1926, Gramsci, on behalf of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of
Italy, intervened on the issue of the confl ict between Stalin and Bukharin, on
the one hand, and the unified opposition of Trotsky, Zinoviev and Kamenev,
on the other. Gramsci was on the side of the majority in the heart of the
matter, however he expressed a clear criticism of the Stalinist method with a
reminder of the need to maintain the party unity and enhance the legacy of
Lenin, an issue he deemed critical for the advancement of the international
communist movement:
It seems to us that the violent passion of the Russian questions causes

you to lose sight of the international aspects of the Russian questions
themselves, causes you to forget that your duties as Russian militants
can and must be fulfi lled only within the context of the interests of the
international proletariat.11 (qtd. in Daniele 408)
Togliatti was in Moscow and there he received the letter from Gramsci who
asked him to forward it to the Bolshevik party. But Togliatti did not share the
content of the letter; he personally spoke to some leaders of the Soviet Com-
munist Party and of the Third International, and decided to hold the letter
without making it public. He asked to review the whole matter at a meeting
of the Central Committee of the Italian Communist Party, where Jules Hum-
bert-Droz was sent as a delegate of the Third International. On October 18,
Togliatti wrote to Gramsci informing him that he did not forward the letter
because it was not appropriate in the phase of heavy confrontation within the
Russian party and was not sufficiently clear in the approval of the line of the
party majority (Stalin-Bukharin) and in the criticism toward the opposition.
The answer of Gramsci, on October 26, was very hard. He wrote, among
other things, “This mode of reasoning of yours has made a very distressing
impression on me” (qtd. in Daniele 437).12 Gramsci complained of the super-
ficiality of Togliatti’s analysis and considered the outcome of the confl ict
within the Bolshevik Party crucial for the fate of international communism.
He claimed that the unity of the communists was of vital importance and
criticized the attitude of the majority, which seemed to want to crush the
opposition. However, following the failed murder attempt of Mussolini on
October 31, fascist violence broke out, leading to several arrests and forcing
many leaders to go underground. Gramsci failed to reach that party meeting
in Valpolcevera (close to Genoa).13 There it was decided to accept Togliatti’s
proposal to suspend the forwarding of Gramsci’s letter, with the only opposi-
tion coming from Vernagoni, who belonged to the left current of the party
led by Bordiga. The evening of November 8, Gramsci was arrested. Gramsci
and Togliatti would never meet again and their last direct correspondence is
related to the clash of 1926. It is easy to understand that in order to build the
legend of a Communist Party whose specificity rested on the solid intellec-

tual and political association of Gramsci and Togliatti, the party leadership
carefully refrained from publishing these letters until after the war. Thus, the
last direct relationship between Gramsci and Togliatti was a tough battle on
an issue of primary importance: the year after, with the expulsion of Trotsky
and other opponents from the party, the historical importance of the confl ict
in 1926 would become very clear.
This clash between Gramsci and Togliatti has been written on extensively
and has created some confusion. Some scholars see the episode as emblematic
of the different characters and moral statures of Gramsci and Togliatti, the first
sensitive to the unity of the movement and respectful of dissent, the second who
cynically adapted to the new Stalinist course. This interpretation accords well
with a hagiographic image of Gramsci built by the same Communist Party
after the war through an instrumental use of witnesses who had known him in
jail and who described him as a man of good character, well disposed toward
“simple people,” and who never failed to have a good word for everybody.14
What we want to reiterate here, however, is the political substance of their
disagreement. Togliatti was in Moscow and certainly had a clearer percep-
tion of the confl ict within the Bolshevik party. In short, he was aware that the
clash had already concluded and had been won by the Stalinist majority so
that the Italian party had no other option than to support—without any ifs,
ands, or buts—the majority. Gramsci’s analysis, however, was more far-seeing
because he understood that the laceration in the party was a consequence of
bureaucratic and sectarian drifts that threatened the very credibility of inter-
national communism. From that confl ict followed the national-bureaucratic
drift of the Bolshevik party, the rupture in international communism and the
institutionalization of violence in the management of the party that escalated
in the 1930s. Thus, in the crucial moment that required an evaluation of
this historic turning point, the positions of Gramsci and Togliatti were radi-
cally opposed. This was the real ground of the confl ict, while the idea that
Gramsci defended the opposition against Stalin is totally groundless. Gram-
sci shared the line of the majority; what separated him from Togliatti was the
reading of the overall strategy of the international communist movement in
the mid-1920s.
But all these fi les were revealed only between the 1960s and 1970s, so
that the ideological construction of the continuous history of the party could
establish itself in the postwar decades. Even the publication of Gramsci’s
writings in L’ordine nuovo (Torino 1954), namely, the writings of Gramsci
in the years of the councils movement in the “two red years,” the “Biennio
Rosso” (1919–1920), did not open a critical debate on the reappraisal of
his work. Only the young intellectuals of the journal, Ragionamenti,15 used
Gramsci’s thoughts of 1919 and 1921 in order to criticize the pattern of
the party promoted by Togliatti within a perspective of research on the
institutions of workers’ power.16 In this perspective, the councils’ democ-
racy was reappraised as a fundamental experience of management of the

production process by the working class that would take it to direct the
whole society, not through the instrument of the proletarian dictatorship,
but by building its own hegemony. Togliatti himself was about to inter-
vene in a speech in 1957, “Attualità del pensiero e dell’azione di Gramsci”
[“The relevance of Gramsci’s thought and action today”]17 to prevent the
recovery of Gramsci’s thought on worker councils casting a shadow on the
clear continuity of the history of the Party. The events in Hungary in 1956
had shifted many intellectuals from the PCI to the PSI (Partito Socialista
Italiano), the “Italian Socialist Party,” although they were positioned on
the radical left within the party. The renovation of the political culture of
the Italian Left was starting to rest on an original reinterpretation of Marx
and on a fruitful confrontation with social sciences, particularly critical
sociology that the PCI had openly opposed, preferring to concentrate on
the cultural opposition to the liberal tradition of Benedetto Croce in terms
that were completely outdated with respect to the recent transformations of
Italian society. The interpretation suggested by Togliatti in 1957 was per-
haps a little less schematic than the one advanced some years before, but
he maintained the thesis of the continuity in the Party history, and saw in
the failure of L’Ordine Nuovo the limits of a vanguard experience which did
not have a political organization able to sustain it. The PCd’I founded in
Livorno after the failure of L’Ordine Nuovo was an evolution of the council
experience according to the Leninist doctrine.
During the 1970s, the analysis of Gramsci’s thought became more com-
plex; contradictory aspects were highlighted as well as a shift in his orienta-
tion and his difficulties within the Party; the letters of 1926 were published in
the Party press and the critical edition of the Prison Notebooks was eventually
published by Valentino Gerratana in 1975. However, Gramsci, because of
his reception in the 1950s and his strong historical identification with the
Communist Party of Togliatti, was not an author of the new left,18 which
developed new theoretical tools starting with a rereading of Marx. Some
authors recovered Gramsci’s thought on worker councils, which could help
to read the Italy of the 1960s and to mobilize and express the radical class
confl icts that crossed it.19
For this exclusion of Gramsci from the theoretical references of the new
left the book by Alberto Asor Rosa, Scrittori e popolo [“Writers and the Peo-
ple”], was decisive. Asor Rosa, literary critic and member of the workerist left,
blamed the cultural policy of the Italian Left in the postwar period, its provin-
cial populism, and the petty bourgeois character of its culture that referred
to a tradition created in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that had its
pillars in Gioberti, De Sanctis, Croce and Gramsci. Much Italian literature
of the twentieth century was consistent with this tradition, the principles of
which had already been formulated in the Risorgimento, and went on unaf-
fected through the Fascist period and was then re-launched by Neorealism
and the PCI. The national and democratic strategy of Togliatti rested on that
tradition and with the reception of the Zhdanovian Socialist Realism would
have encouraged a moderate, passive, national and nostalgic portrait of the
“poor people” who lived in the Italian province and had no class connota-
tions. In this way, Togliatti developed a cultural policy consistent with the
populist political mythology he had placed at the base of the Party’s strategy
in the 1940s. Essential terms of this literary culture were its sentimental real-
ism and the research on social subjects often detached from specific socio-
historical contexts, who were peasants rather than blue collar workers and
were generally located in the South, paradigmatic site of a populist rhetoric
that in the 1950s was enriched by the works of Carlo Levi and Danilo Dolci.
The insistence on the national character of this tradition meant distance, if not
open hostility, to the great twentieth-century tradition of European literary
research. Gramsci, according to Asor Rosa, was a crucial element of media-
tion between the moderate tradition of populism and the strategy of the Italian
Communist Party. Thus Asor Rosa shared in Togliatti’s reading of Gramsci,
although in order to reverse its sign. Asor Rosa, against the sentimental evo-
cation of the people, argued for the political centrality of the working class
and against the national and provincial neorealism for the avant-garde and
its open European horizons. Asor Rosa took on theoretical innovation at the
historical-literary level where workerism was introduced in the Italian politi-
cal thought of the 1960s. In this sense it represented a major break and a radi-
cal critique of the strategy of the postwar Communist Party.
To reread them today, Asor Rosa’s pages on Gramsci appear to be ungen-
erous and substantially off-centered, but it is clear that Asor Rosa was not
interested in a close analysis of Gramsci’s texts, but rather to draw criti-
cism to a tradition that had been founded through Gramsci after the Second
World War. Not by chance Asor Rosa spoke more of “Gramscianesimo”
[Gramscianism] rather than of Gramsci. Asor Rosa was able to address a
sharp critique to decades of cultural backwardness of the Communist Party
with its distrust of the international avant-garde culture, ignorance of the
social sciences, and the inability to grasp the contradictions of an advanced
industrial society. For many young intellectuals this vehement complaint
against the national populist culture was certainly perceived as the shedding
of an ideological cloak that compressed political energies rather than orga-
nize and mobilize them. However, this reading came to put a tombstone on
any possible alternative use of Gramsci’s work.
There are many criticisms that can be made of Asor Rosa’s reading of
Gramsci. Gramsci’s attention to the local and national level is constantly
placed in an international and global dimension. This is the framework in
which Gramsci’s thought makes sense, although he was nevertheless well
aware of the importance of nation building as a constitutive element of social
processes of modernity, such as wars and revolutions.20 The national dimen-
sion had to be carefully analyzed in order to avoid an abstract and schematic
interpretation of social processes, and in this sense, Gramsci developed the

research on nation and nationalism which had become crucial in the inter-
national Marxist debate at the beginning of the century. But there are at least
three other aspects of Gramsci’s thought that Asor Rosa surprisingly failed
to appreciate. First, Gramsci’s analysis of culture proved to be very keen,
precisely in the direction which Asor Rosa hoped for, i.e., the battle against
idealism and a materialistic view of cultural processes.21 Second, the analysis
of the culture of the subaltern in the Prison Notebooks is far from any apologia;
indeed, it denounced its more reactionary and regressive aspects, however
imagining it as the only possible starting point for a political struggle that
aimed at mobilizing subalterns who inevitably defi ne themselves through the
lens of the dominant culture. According to Gramsci, peasant and subaltern
cultures22 do not in themselves automatically carry any antagonistic and pro-
gressive meaning, contrary to the opinion of some scholars of the “history
from below,” which was so successful even in Italy in the 1960s and 1970s.
Finally, what is surprising is Asor Rosa’s separation of Gramsci as liter-
ary critic from Gramsci as political thinker, because the unification of these
two figures prevents locking him into a national tradition that he confronts
in order to overthrow its hegemony. Gramsci was the leader of an interna-
tionalist party that in the 1920s and 1930s was just coming to terms with the
difficult terrain of articulating the local and national level with the inter-
national dimension in which to fight against global capitalism. This keen
perception of the global dimension of capitalism was openly discussed in
“Notebook 22,” “Americanismo e fordismo,” “Americanism and Fordism,”
and the already mentioned confl ict with Togliatti in 1926 bears tragic witness
to the international dimension of Gramsci’s thought. In the famous letter of
1926, Gramsci was talking of the difficult relationship between local and
international levels in the history of communism, and although he joined the
majority’s argument against the unified opposition, his call for unity of the
Leninists was not a simple tribute to orthodoxy but the prophetic intuition
that a split of an international movement on a national confl ict was a harbin-
ger of doom for the history of international communism.
At any rate, the text of Asor Rosa, despite the limited relevance of his cri-
tique of Gramsci, was central in the critique of the cultural tradition of the
PCI that had been based on a certain reception of Gramsci. In the 1960s,
Italy became an advanced industrial society and the intellectual apparatus
built by the Italian Communist Party after the war proved to be increas-
ingly obsolete. The most innovative categories of social analysis and politi-
cal intervention in social struggles were put forward from outside of the
PCI and of its surrounding intellectual influence. From the intellectual and
political environment of workerism came some of the most interesting hints
toward a new political culture able to interpret the powerful social confl icts
of those years.
“Our Near Past”: Marx v. Gramsci in

the Experience of Workerism
Also known as “autonomist Marxism,” “workerism” was surely the most
important and original theoretical and political development within Italian
Marxism in the 1960s. 23 It played a crucial role both in the interpretation of
the powerful workers’ struggles that shook the country during that decade
and in the formation of the revolutionary groups that shaped the “long” Ital-
ian 1968 movement—from 1968 to 1977. English-speaking readers may be
familiar with what is today called “post-workerism,” associated with Anto-
nio Negri whose theories have deeply influenced international debates on
globalization and within cultural and postcolonial studies since the publica-
tion of Empire.
“Workerism” was, of course, not the only relevant development within Ital-
ian critical theory in the 1960s. As far as the legacy of Gramsci is concerned,
it is worth mentioning the influence of the great anthropologist Ernesto De
Martino, and the emergence of vast grassroots movements engaged in the
south of the country in the project of developing what has been recently
called an “ethnography of Italian subalterns.” Poor Southern peasants and
rural day laborers were considered by these researchers and activists as the
“internal others” par excellence, as the subjects who were to play a seminal
role in the re-politicization of the “Southern Question” and in the renewal of
the Gramscian project of an alliance between Northern industrial workers
and Southern peasants. 24 These experiences were often shaped by an origi-
nal reading of Gramsci’s reflections on “subaltern groups” and “folklore” in
the Prison Notebooks (especially “Notebook 25” and “27”). They nurtured a
kind of underground Gramscian stream that in the following years deeply
influenced the development of ethnology, anthropology and museography
in Italy.
Nevertheless, the importance of “workerism” cannot be underestimated.
In the 1960s the workerist intellectuals, researchers and militants seemed able
to provide the most effective interpretations of what was called at the begin-
ning of the decade “neo-capitalism,” the spectacular economic development
as a result of “Fordist” mass industrialization that dramatically changed the
productive, social and cultural landscape of the country. In a book published
in 1972, which remains the most important workerist statement on the issue,
Luciano Ferrari Bravo and Alessandro Serafi ni noted that the very “South-
ern Question” changed its profi le through the mass emigration toward the
North and the contradictory take off of industrialization processes in several
Southern areas between the end of the 1950s and the early 1960s. The reality
of the Fordist factory was the research object and the political stake for the
development of workerism in the 1960s. Such journals as Quaderni rossi and
Classe operaia brought together intellectuals, researchers, militant workers
and union organizers who, in the majority, had no previous political experi-
ence or came from the left of the Italian Socialist Party, such as the founder of
Quaderni rossi, Raniero Panzieri, as well as Antonio Negri. The Roman group
around Mario Tronti and the already mentioned Alberto Asor Rosa were an
exception in this regard, since they were part of the University section of the
Italian Communist Party. But in general the relation between “workerism”
and the PCI was from the beginning very tense and confl ict-ridden, and this
is easy to understand since workerism as a whole developed a radical critique
of the national hegemony project that had been elaborated by Togliatti in
the previous years. It is nevertheless worth recalling that both Mario Tronti
and Alberto Asor Rosa, as well as the younger student of Negri’s, Massimo
Cacciari (who was to become a well-known philosopher and later, the mayor
of Venice), decided to continue their political militancy in the Communist
Party after 1968, further elaborating the legacy of workerism in peculiar
ways that were quite influential for the cultural politics of the party in the
1970s and in the 1980s.
The birth of workerism in the early 1960s is a turning point not only for the
political culture of the left and for the development of critical theory in Italy,
it is also a crucial moment in order to understand the destiny of Gramsci in
his home country in the following decades. For instance, if one looks at the
history of the British New Left, at South America or India, it is easy to see that
Gramsci’s thought provided crucial tools that helped to break with Marxist
orthodoxy as represented by official Communist parties. This rupture must
be recognized as the point of inception of some of the most important and cre-
ative developments of contemporary critical theory, in which the reference to
Gramsci continues to be a defining theoretical element—from cultural to post-
colonial and the Subaltern Studies project. In order to understand the different
situation in Italy, one has to realize that the break with Marxist and communist
orthodoxy was indeed a break with Gramsci, meaning a break with the image
of Gramsci that took shape through the interpretation of his work within the
Italian Communist Party in the 1940s and 1950s and that we have tried to
reconstruct. And while for example, in Great Britain the basic critical move
was to disentangle the element of “workers’ consciousness” from an “objectiv-
ist” reading of capitalist development, in Italy the workerist engagement with
the reality of the Fordist factory immediately raised the problem of subjectivity.
Inhabited by what Tronti memorably termed the rude razza pagana, “the
rough pagan race” (that is, the new “mass worker,” young, and mostly South-
ern migrant workers), the factory, as represented for instance by the huge
FIAT plants in Turin, or by the emerging chemical industrial complex of Porto
Marghera (Venice) was, in the eyes of the workerists, eventually opening up
modernity in Italy. What Asor Rosa criticized, as we saw above, from the point
of view of literature, the sentimental and nostalgic longing for the “people”
of the province, became a kind of general cipher of an Italian provincialism
that the struggles of the working class were getting rid of. The workerists were
deeply convinced that Italy was becoming a very advanced revolutionary labo-
ratory, and this meant that there was a need for a “philosophy”—or better for
a “science”—capable of interpreting such advanced struggles. Needless to say,
this could not be a “provincial” philosophy.
From this point of view, in order to understand the relation of the workerists
with Gramsci it is particularly important to read an essay published in 1959 by
Mario Tronti, “Tra materialismo dialettico e filosofia della prassi. Gramsci e
Labriola” [“Between dialectical materialism and philosophy of praxis. Gramsci
and Labriola”]. The importance of Gramsci is recognized from the first lines by
Tronti, who states that “the whole cultural world of his age is interpreted and
‘translated’ in his thought.” But this is precisely the key to an interpretation of
Gramsci that aims at locating his work within a history and a cultural constella-
tion that are “immediately behind us” and that build our “near past” (in Carac-
ciolo and Scalia 141). Even more relevant for our present discussion is Tronti’s
argument that Gramsci “is a typically, I would even say fundamentally Italian
thinker,” and that it would be a mistake to give him “a European range” (“Tra
materialismo dialettico e filosofia della prassi” 156). Revisiting through Gram-
sci the history of the debates on Marx and Marxism in Italy since the late 1890s,
Tronti argues that Gramsci himself remained caught within an interpretation
of Marx shaped by idealism and historicism—that means by the philosophical
interpretations provided by Giovanni Gentile and Benedetto Croce (“Tra mate-
rialismo dialettico e filosofia della prassi” 156–61).
One could say that the basic aim of Tronti and of most workerist theorists
in the following decade was to disentangle Marx from idealism and histori-
cism, and this meant to also disentangle him from Gramsci. Back to Marx
became the slogan of workerism, which led to a tight engagement fi rst of all
with Capital, volume 1 (especially with the chapters on “The Working Day”
and on “Machinery and Large-Scale Industry” 25 ), and soon afterwards with
the Grundrisse.26 And while Gramsci was a point of entry to understand the
past, Marx was to be read in the present: he must be confronted “not with his
age, but with ours. Capital has to be evaluated on the basis of contemporary
capitalism” (Tronti, Operai e capitale 31). In 1966, Mario Tronti summed up
the results of his engagement with Marx, publishing Operai e capitale, a book
that was to become famous for the thesis of the priority of workers’ struggles
with respect to capitalist development. 27
At the same time, one has to keep in mind that the criticism of idealism
and historicism opened up the possibility of a direct engagement with sociol-
ogy, and especially labor and industrial sociology, that were in a way banned
in the 1950s (of course with some relevant exceptions) with a reference to
the authority of Gramsci and Croce, both from Marxist and from “liberal”
culture. Some of the most important Italian labor and industrial sociologists
of the following decades—from Aris Accornero to Giovanni Mottura—had
their training in such journals as Quaderni rossi and Classe operaia. These jour-
nals started to produce an accurate cartography of workers’ conditions and
struggles under the conditions of neo-capitalism, stressing the importance of
seemingly “un-political” workers’ behaviors such as absenteeism and small

(even individual) gestures of sabotage, and initiated “militant investigations”
(or “co-researches”) in many factories, directly involving workers in the pro-
duction of knowledge on their living and work conditions and experimenting
with the transformation of this knowledge into a condition for struggle.28
“Militant investigation” and “co-research” became the tools through
which the cartography of workers’ conditions and struggles turned into a
cartography of subjectivity (we could even say, with contemporary terms, of
the production of subjectivity). As we were anticipating previously, Italian
workerists did not use the concept of “class consciousness” in their researches
and in their political theory. It is easy to see that this happened because of
the “idealist” imprinting of the very concept of consciousness. Instead of an
emphasis on class consciousness, the way out of any possible kind of “objec-
tivism” was sought, on the one hand, through the already mentioned thesis of
the priority of workers’ struggles with respect to capitalist development, and,
on the other hand, through the forging of the category of class composition
and through a focus on the tension between its “technical” and its “political”
dimensions. The concept of “technical class composition” was worked out as
a kind of reverse side of what Marx had termed the “organic composition of
capital,” and was meant to grasp from the workers’ point of view the struc-
ture of the capitalist organization of labor. To this, the concept of a “political
class composition” was added in order to take the subjective behaviors, the
needs, and the traditions of struggle into account when defi ning class.
The subjective figure of the “mass worker” (operaio massa) correspond-
ing to neo-capitalism was interpreted as the partial subject that carried the
whole weight of mass production and that had the potential to blow up the
discipline and order of the “factory-society” with its correlate ideologies of
social integration and welfare. It is precisely the emphasis on the partiality
of this subject that leads Tronti to produce a radical rupture with the ideol-
ogy and the project of the Communist party, which through a specific and,
as we saw, very selective interpretation of Gramsci, did not center upon the
working class but rather upon the “people”: “when the working class politi-
cally refuses to become people,” writes Tronti in 1963, “this does not mean
that the straight way toward socialist revolution is being closed: the opposite
is true, it is rather the opening up of that way” (Operai e capitale 79). Tronti’s
criticism applies not only to the concept of the people, but also to the concept
of “general will” and to the political language of universalism in general,
deconstructing the whole strategy of “progressive democracy” envisioned
by Palmiro Togliatti. The name of Gramsci was so deeply associated with
this strategy that he was not even mentioned in Operai e capitale. And while
the concept of culture was playing a crucial role in the UK, for example, in
an attempt to innovate the working class’s history and politics that shared at
least some concerns with Italian workerism, Tronti was in a hurry to get rid
of it as a legacy of the “near past” to which he relegated Gramsci. The very
concept of culture, he wrote in 1965,
does not mean anything more, or it takes up a totally alien meaning for
the working class as a partial subject. Culture in fact, like the concept of
Right, of which Marx speaks, is always bourgeois. In other words, it is
always a relation between intellectuals and society, between intellectuals
and the people, between intellectuals and class; in this way it is always
a mediation of confl icts and their resolution in something else. If culture
is the reconstruction of the totality of man, the search for his humanity
in the world, a vocation to keep united that which is divided—then it is
something which is by nature reactionary and should be treated as such.
(Operai e capitale 245)
“Culture” appeared to Tronti closely associated with the concept of the

“people,” which he was criticizing as the cornerstone of what appeared to
him as a populist strategy of the Communist party.29 More precisely it was
considered by him as the crystallization of a specific hegemonic constellation
that the Communist Party was indeed contributing to enforce and reproduce
(both through its “intellectuals” and through its action in “society”), while
the insurgence of the working class as a partial subject was radically challeng-
ing it. This is perhaps the point in which the development of workerism was
furthest away from the Communist Party reading of Gramsci in the 1960s.
Back Home
After the great rupture produced by the 1968 movement and by the dramatic
workers’ struggles during the fall of 1969, Gramsci was of course circulating
among the revolutionary groups of the Italian new left: the group of il Mani-
festo gathered around such important political and intellectual former leaders
of the Communist Party as Rossana Rossanda, Luigi Pintor, and Valentino
Parlato (they were expelled from the party after openly criticizing the USSR
intervention in Czechoslovakia), and took Gramsci’s writings on the workers’
councils as an important point of reference in the development of its reading
of the Italian situation in the early 1970s. Also to be mentioned here is the
activity of the “Gruppo Gramsci” in Milan, in which important intellectuals
and political cadres such as Romano Madera, Luisa Passerini, and Giovanni
Arrighi were active. This experience—“a rarity in the extra-parliamentary
left,” as Arrighi himself retrospectively recognized—was meant in Gramscian
terms to forge “organic intellectuals of the working class in struggle,” whose
function was to help the class to develop its own “autonomy” (61–94, 66f). 30
Nevertheless, Gramsci did not play an important role in the debates of the
“new left” in the 1970s, while he continued to be at the core of the intellectual
discussion within the Communist party. Independently of an extraordinary
production of specialized scholarly works of heterogeneous quality, 31 at stake
from a political point of view was a new reading of the concept of hegemony.
This new reading stressed the “organicistic” elements of Gramsci’s thought,
making him available for a legitimization of the new strategy of the so-called
“historical compromise.” The “historical compromise” meant the alliance
with the Christian Democratic Party in the perspective of a revival of the
founding spirit of the Republic after 1945, which the general secretary of the
party, Enrico Berlinguer, started to develop in the wake of his interpretation
of the 1973 coup in Chile and of the ongoing radicalization of social struggles
and movements in Italy. From this point of view, a lively discussion devel-
oped around the thesis presented by Norberto Bobbio, who emphasized the
“super-structural” elements of Gramsci’s concept of civil society and made
this concept itself an important political battlefield. 32 Bobbio’s reading was
rooted in the liberal reading of Gramsci that had its antecedents in Bene-
detto Croce and Piero Gobetti. But it resulted, on the one hand, in making
Gramsci even more distant from the intellectual references of the diverse
spectrum of the radical left, and, on the other, it attracted severe criticism
from intellectuals tied to the Communist Party. One could even say that Bob-
bio’s insistence on the cultural fabric of civil society anticipated some terms
of later Gramscian revivals.
After the electoral successes of the Communist Party in the mid-1970s,
it entered a phase of decline and the strategy itself of the “historical com-
promise” was a failure in the turbulent years that closed one of the most
important and confl ict-ridden decades in the history of the Italian Republic.
The 1980s were shaped by a confused search for new models and perspec-
tives within the Communist Party. In this search, Gramsci was progressively
marginalized from the intellectual debate, and one can say that the end of
the Communist Party after 1989 also marked the vanishing of a “cultural
industry” revolving around the name of Gramsci, an industry which flour-
ished for four decades, monopolizing the interpretation of his thought, surely
producing some important scholarly achievements but also radically limiting
the potentiality and reducing the openness of his work.
At the same time, an awareness of the existence of a different debate on
Gramsci beyond the borders of his native land started to spread in Italy.33
It was no coincidence that one of the fi rst points of crystallization of a new
interest for Gramsci (one which was nevertheless bound to remain quite
marginal in the Italian academic and intellectual life) was “Notebook 22,”
“Americanism and Fordism.” Giorgio Baratta, who would emerge as a cen-
tral figure in this new season of Italian Gramscian studies, organized a con-
ference on Gramsci’s critique of Americanism in 1987. It was an important
landmark in the process of “provincializing” the Italian discussion on Gram-
sci and recovering the global perspective inherent in his thought. 34 “Note-
book 22” presented moreover an analysis of the complex relations between
“culture” and production that were emerging as crucial, precisely in the crisis
of Fordism, as had already been stressed by the so-called French regulation
school and would lie at the core of Stuart Hall’s controversial reading of
the New Times inaugurated by Thatcherism in the UK. 35 In the following
years, Baratta, who was also the founder of the Italian section of the Interna-
tional Gramsci Society, contributed to the reception of the most stimulating
readings of Gramsci developed especially in the Latin American experience
(especially Carlos Nelson Coutinho) and within cultural and postcolonial
studies (especially Edward Said and Stuart Hall).36 A conference organized
in 2007 in Rome titled “Gramsci, Cultures and the World” was a kind of con-
cluding step in this direction: after many travels around the world, Gramsci
was coming back to Italy in a quite different shape than the one that had
dominated the postwar era. 37
Outlining a Research Agenda

In the last decade, the Italian debate and scholarly research on Gramsci has
been particularly intense, producing important philosophical and political
general interpretations of his thought as well as bibliographical and even
encyclopedic reference works. 38 But independently of individual achieve-
ments, what characterizes the new season of Italian Gramsci studies that
started in the 1990s is the recovery of the global dimension of Gramscian
thought and concepts that, as we have seen, had been previously inscribed
within a rather parochial intellectual and historical experience. In what fol-
lows we would like to outline a kind of research agenda, indicating some of
the basic topics and insights that are already developed in the Italian discus-
sion and could be even more elaborated in the near future.
As Edward Said, in particular, has emphasized, the importance of space in
Gramsci’s thought (his “geographical materialism”) opens up the possibility
of using his concepts in order to reconstruct the historical and contemporary
dynamics of global capitalism in its multi-scalar hierarchies, relations, and
confl icts. 39 This seems to us one of the most promising research perspectives
to be developed in the near future. The interpenetration and increasing over-
lap between the local, the national, and the global would have been a topic
of great interest for Gramsci himself, who was particularly sensitive to the
mobility and elusiveness of spatial coordinates. Writing to his brother Carlo
on September 28, 1931, Gramsci commented on H. G. Wells’ Short History
of the World,
It is interesting because it tends to break with the prevailing habit of

thinking that history only existed in Europe, particularly in ancient
times; Wells discusses the ancient history of China, India, and the medi-
eval history of the Mongols with the same tone he adopts in speaking of
European history. He shows that from a world standpoint Europe should
not be regarded as anything more than a province that considers itself
the depository of all world civilization. (Gramsci, Letters from Prison, ed.
Rosengarten 2:80)
In this perspective, the nation itself becomes a specific historical actor, which
played a fundamental role in European modernity, but not the exclusive
semantic horizon within which Gramscian concepts are located. As Gramsci
wrote on August 8, 1927 in a kind of postcolonial mood to his friend Berti
commenting on Henri Massis’ Défence de l’Occident,
What makes me laugh is the fact that this eminent Massis, who is dread-
fully afraid that Tagore’s and Gandhi’s Asiatic ideology might destroy
French Catholic rationalism, does not realise that Paris has already be-
come a semicolony of Senegalese intellectualism and that in France the
number of half-breeds is increasing by leaps and bounds. One might,
just for a laugh, maintain that, if Germany is the extreme outcrop of
ideological Asianism, France is the beginning of darkest Africa and the
jazz band is the fi rst molecule of a new Euro-African civilization! (Gram-
sci, Letters from Prison, ed. Rosengarten 1:128)
Crucial from the point of view of the formulation of his “geographical

materialism” has been, of course, Gramsci’s work on the Southern Question.
We do think that rereading these writings is particularly telling not only for
the topic discussed but also more generally in terms of method. We fi nd here
a topological model of analysis of the peculiarities of Italian capitalism, of
the social forces that shape it, of the political alliances, and confl icts among
these diverse social segments, but above all of the multifarious ways in which
power relations between them are continuously arranged and rearranged,
establishing mobile forms of cultural hegemony. It is in this framework that
the figure of the “subaltern” becomes a subject of history, with a specific
gaze on the cultural forms of expression that were particularly analyzed by
Gramsci in “Notebook 25” and “Notebook 27,” where he speaks of “folklore”
not as something “picturesque” but as a “conception of the world and of
life of certain defi ned social strata (defi ned in time and in space)” (2311).
Entering history, subalterns do not enter a kind of teleological process, and
their “spontaneous philosophy,” as Gramsci also writes, is not necessarily
“progressive.” Nevertheless, it is the inescapable point of reference for politi-
cal mobilization of subalterns themselves as well as for a materialist writing
of history.
In the field of tension between the two concepts of hegemony and subal-
tern, a whole series of problems, dynamics, and confl icts can be relocated
and investigated anew: from the question of ideology to investigation of the
social pressures that limit and shape individual behaviors (what Gramsci
analyzes through such keywords as conformismo, “conformism,” and uomo-
massa, “man-as-mass” (Prison Notebooks 3:164–66). The field of “culture,”
sharply criticized and radically dismissed in the 1960s by Mario Tronti, pres-
ents itself now as a privileged field on which the crucial issue of the produc-
tion of subjectivity under the conditions of contemporary capitalism can be
critically analyzed. This critical analysis can fi nd in Gramsci’s answer to the
question “What is Man?” a surprisingly useful tool. It is worth rereading it
after the whole discussion on the crisis of humanism and post-structuralist
deconstruction of the subject: “[M]an must be conceived of as a historical
complex made up of purely individual and subjective elements on the one
hand, and on the other, of mass, objective or material elements, with which
the individual has an active relationship” (Quaderni 1338).
Another topic worth developing is Gramsci’s thought and his reflection
on language in general, and specifically on translation and translatability.40
“Notebook 29,” “Note sullo studio della grammatica” (“Notes on the study
of grammar”), the last “Notebook,” demonstrates this reflection. The distinc-
tion formulated by Gramsci between “normative grammar,” on the one hand,
and “spontaneous and immanent grammars,” on the other hand, seems to
be particularly promising, especially if we connect it with the defi nition of
“man” quoted previously. In a way, the “normative grammar” discussed by
Gramsci seems to be one of those “mass and objective elements” that make
up “man,” while “spontaneous and immanent grammars” (whose number
is “incalculable and theoretically one can say that everybody has his or her
grammar”) surely correspond to the “purely individual and subjective ele-
ments” (Quaderni 2343). More generally, Gramsci seems once more particu-
larly sensitive here to the mobility of languages and to the reality of power
relations that crisscross the processes of their formation and that shape their
relations—in other words, he was sensitive to an issue that is widely recog-
nized as crucial in our postcolonial world.
A very rich reflection on the issue of translation relates to this conception
of language in the Notebooks. It is worth emphasizing that the very root of the
problem for Gramsci is political, and he was already aware of that in the wake
of the Russian revolution. One of the most intense paragraphs on the problem
of translation in the Notebooks is introduced by a quote from Lenin, who said in
1921 that “we haven’t managed to translate our language,” meaning the revo-
lutionary politics of the Bolsheviks themselves, “into the European languages”
(Quaderni 1468). Starting from this very peculiar problem of “translation,”
Gramsci developed a multi-scalar theory of translation (linguistic, scientific,
philosophical, popular, cultural, and so on) that although fragmentary, seems
to be particularly topical. In a way, it allows to combine and articulate, as a
kind of mobile and flexible platform, the interplay of the three previous points
that we briefly discussed: Gramsci’s “geographical materialism,” his “topologi-
cal” reflection on the cultural dynamics of hegemony, and his approach to the
issue of subjectivation. It is working from within this mobile and flexible plat-
form that we hope new Italian studies and scholars will be able to contribute
in an innovative and creative way to the ongoing transnational and transcon-
tinental conversation on Gramsci’s thought.
Notes
1. See Tronti, “Tra materialismo dialettico e fi losofia della prassi,” 141–62. We
discuss Tronti’s essay subsequently (second section).
2. The analysis of the fascist movement as a “regime reazionario di massa” (reac-
tionary regime with mass support) was outlined by Togliatti in 1935 in a series
of lectures held in Moscow, but published in Italy only in 1970. These lectures
represented a very stimulating analysis of fascism and the awareness of the mass
character of fascist organizations influenced Togliatti’s project of the “partito
nuovo”; see Togliatti, Lezioni sul fascismo.
3. This book won the Premio Viareggio, a major Italian literary prize. In 1950 the
Fondazione Istituto Gramsci was founded, whose aim was to promote research
on Gramsci’s work and the communist movement. In the 1960s the Istituto
Gramsci acquired the letters and the notebooks of Gramsci.
4. This censorship was denounced by the socialist historian Salvatore Sechi already
in 1965; see Sechi, “Le ‘lettere dal carcere’ e la politica culturale del Pci” (1965),
now in Movimento operaio e storiografia marxista, Bari, De Donato, 1974. The fact that
Gramsci’s reception after the war was based on a heavy manipulation and some-
times falsification of his writings is nowadays recognized by scholars with different
orientations in the interpretation of Gramsci; see Vacca, “Togliatti editore delle Let-
tere e dei Quaderni del carcere,” in Vacca, Togliatti sconosciuto 123–69; Bermani 2007.
5. Palmiro Togliatti, Trenta anni di vita e lotte del Pci.
6. A substantial change in the historiography on the Italian Communist Party was
introduced by the huge work of Paolo Spriano, whose fi rst volume was pub-
lished in 1967; see Spriano 1967–1975.
7. Amadeo Bordiga was the leading founder of the PCd’I in 1921, his left-wing
positions within the communist movement had been attacked by Lenin already
in 1920 in Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder. In the following years
Bordiga maintained a critical position toward the development of the Bolsche-
vik Party in Russia and its leading role in the Third International, and he was
a prominent representative of the so-called left-wing communism so that he
was marginalized both in the Italian and international communist movement.
Bordiga was expelled by the Communist Party in 1930 and he never went
back. After the second World War he founded his own small revolutionary
party which did not have any significant role in Italian politics; on Bordiga
see De Clementi.
8. The fi rst edition of the Prison Notebooks was published by Einaudi (Torino) in
six thematic volumes between 1948 and 1951, edited by Felice Platone under
the supervision of Togliatti. The Selections from the Prison Notebooks, edited and
translated by Hoare and Smith, which shaped the discussion of Gramsci’s work
in the Anglophone world, was based on this edition.
9. Croce has been the most influential intellectual of Italian idealism in the twenti-
eth century. His work constituted the basis of the education of the liberal ruling
class in Italy. The Italian Communist Party aimed at refuting Croce, stressing
the role of the “common people” in nation building and in the development
of Italian modernity, but it shared with Croce a similar historicist-progressive
vision of history.
10. In the 1970s, just in the phase of Fordism’s crisis, some scholars began to pay
more attention to “Notebook 22,” on “Americanism and Fordism”; see the spe-
cial edition of the Notebook edited by F. De Felice in 1978. Some papers pre-
sented at the Gramsci conference of 1977 have a focus on “americanismo e
fordismo,” in particular Bodei, Battini, Salvadori, Paggi, F. de Felice; see Ferri
1977. Within the workerist debate, Sergio Bologna recovered Gramsci’s thought.
In the following years, interest grew in “Notebook 22,” and the analysis of it
signaled the engagement with Gramsci of Giorgio Baratta, one of the most dis-
tinguished scholars of the Gramsci renaissance of the last twenty years. See
Baratta and Catone (eds.), Modern Times. A brilliant reading of the influence
of “Notebook 22” in postwar Italian debates on the left, “through and beyond
workerism,” has been recently provided by Boni 79–88.
11. “[C]i pare che la passione violenta delle quistioni russe vi faccia perdere di vista
gli aspetti internazionali delle quistioni russe stesse, vi faccia dimenticare che
i vostri doveri di militanti russi possono e debbono essere adempiuti solo nel
quadro degli interessi del proletariato internazionale,” Gramsci, letter of Octo-
ber 14. The correspondence of 1926 is now entirely published in Chiara Daniele
(ed.), Gramsci a Roma, Togliatti a Mosca. Il carteggio del 1926. In an essay within
this book, Vacca reads these letters within the internal debate of the Italian
Communist Party in those years, focusing on the confl icts between the political
strategies of Gramsci and Togliatti. The text of the fi rst letter had been already
published by Tasca in 1938; the answer of Togliatti was published in Rinascita
in 1964; the above objection of Gramsci was published only in 1970. It was
certainly not by chance that Togliatti published a part of the correspondence
just three months before his death at a moment in which, faced with the confl ict
between the Soviet Union and China, he was outlining a critical perspective on
the history of international communism.
12. An English translation of this letter can be found in http://www.marxists.org/
archive/gramsci/1926/10/letter-togliatti.htm.
13. Gramsci was stopped in Milan and sent back to Rome by the police. What
occurred in those days has been clarified by a letter of Tatiana Schucht discov-
ered only in 2008 and published in L’Unità on November 7, 2008.
14. Emblematic of this hagiography is the fi rst biography of Gramsci, by Lucio
Lombardo Radice and Giuseppe Carbone, Vita di Antonio Gramsci (1952). This
book contributed to consolidating the historiographical tradition discussed
above, i.e. a direct line which linked Ordine Nuovo, PCd’I (Partito Comunista
d’Italia), and the “partito nuovo” (the “new party”) bound by the relationship
between Gramsci and Togliatti. This orthodox tradition eliminated every other
voice which had contributed to the history of the Italian communist movement,
labeling them as sectarians and heretics.
15. Ragionamenti was an innovative journal animated by young intellectuals clos-
est to the socialist party and was fi nanced by Gian Giacomo Feltrinelli; see
Colummi 31–56.
16. This rereading of Gramsci’s thought in the early 1920s was encouraged also
by Antonio Giolitti in the VIII congress (1956) of the PCI, which was the last
before his exit from the party. See Giolitti 1957.
17. Republished in Togliatti, Gramsci 193–212.
18. An exception was represented by scholars who considered Gramsci a man
betrayed by the party, according to an interpretation that was already claimed

by the Italian Trotskyists (see Corvisieri 1969).
19. Meaningful is an essay written just on the eve of the 1968 events; see Merli
1967.
20. On this point see Baratta, “Popolo, nazione, masse nel pensiero di Gramsci,” in
Baratta and Catone 9–41.
21. See Forgacs, “National-Popular: Genealogy of a Concept.”
22. On the Gramscian defi nition of “gruppi sociali subalterni” (subaltern social
groups), see Baratta, “Gramsci e i subalterni,” in Adamo 83–99; and Buttigieg,
“Sulla categoria gramsciana di ‘subalterno’,” in Baratta e Liguori (eds.), Gramsci
da un secolo all’altro, 27–38.
23. For a good introduction in English, see Wright. In Italian see Asor Rosa,
1649ff; Trotta and Milana, L’operaismo degli anni Sessanta. Da “Quaderni rossi”
a “classe operaia.”
24. Cf. Rivera in Adamo 111–32.
25. See Marx, Capital, Chapter 10 (“The Working Day”) and Chapter 15 (“Machin-
ery and Large-Scale Industry”).
26. See for instance Marx, Scritti and above all the fi rst translation (by Renato
Solmi) of the so-called “Fragment on the machines” from the Grundrisse in Quad-
erni rossi, 4 (1964), 289–300. The fi rst Italian edition of the Grundrisse was also
translated and edited by a workerist intellectual, Enzo Grillo; cf. Marx, Linea-
menti fondamentali della critica dell’economia politica. See also Negri, Marx Beyond
Marx: Lessons on the Grundrisse.
27. On the continuing importance of Tronti’s “Copernican revolution,” see Hardt
and Negri, Commonwealth 290–95.
28. See for instance the work of the “inventor” of the methodology of “militant
investigation” or “co-research,” Alquati.
29. One could recall here the recent interpretation of Togliatti’s “new party” in
terms of populism provided by Laclau, On Populist Reason. Needless to say,
while Laclau uses the concept of populism in positive terms, Tronti was radi-
cally criticizing the centrality of the “people” (and not of the working class)
in the political strategy and discourse of the Communist party in the 1950s
and 1960s.
30. Arrighi also mentions in this important interview that in the postscript to the
second edition of The Geometry of Imperialism (1983) he argued “that the Grams-
cian concept of hegemony could be more useful than imperialism in analyzing
contemporary dynamics of the inter-state system” (70): his experience in the
“Gruppo Gramsci” was thus an important step in the formulation of a theory
of the world system of historical capitalism that has played a crucial role in the
international debate of the last two decades.
31. For one of the most important works on Gramsci in these years, see Paggi.
32. Bobbio’s pamphlet developed the text of a paper presented by him in 1967 at a
conference for the thirtieth anniversary of Gramsci’s death.
33. An important event in this regard was the conference organized by the “Fondazi-
one Istituto Gramsci” in 1989 in Formia: see the proceedings, Righi (ed), Gram-
sci nel mondo. See also Santucci.
34. Baratta and Catone (eds.), Tempi moderni.
35. See for instance Aglietta, and Hall and Jacques.
36. See for instance Baratta, Le rose e i Quaderni. Il pensiero dialogico di Antonio
Gramsci.
37. See the proceedings in Schirru (ed.), Gramsci, le culture, il mondo. A collection
of landmark essays in cultural studies on Gramsci has been edited by Vacca,
Capuzzo, and Schirru, Studi gramsciani nel mondo: gli studi culturali.
38. See for instance Burgio, Gramsci storico. Una lettura dei Quaderni del carcere;
Frosini, Da Gramsci a Marx. Ideologia, verità, politica; Liguori, Sentieri gramsciani;
and Guido Liguori and Pasquale Voza (eds.), Dizionario gramsciano.
39. Particularly important in this regard is the work done in Naples by Lidia Curti
and Iain Chambers: see for instance Chambers (ed.), Esercizi di potere. Gramsci,
Said e il postcoloniale.
40. There is of course a wide literature especially on the issue of translation and
translatability in Gramsci’s thought. Particularly important in the Italian debate
has been the work on Gramsci and language by Lo Piparo, Lingua, intellettuali,
egemonia. See also his recent essay, “Gramsci and Wittgenstein. An Intriguing
Connection,” in Capone (ed.), Perspectives on Language Use and Pragmatic: A Vol-
ume in Memory of Sorin Stati.
3 The Travels of the
Organic Intellectual
The Black Colonized Intellectual in
George Padmore and Frantz Fanon 1
Neelam Srivastava
Ross Posnock, in a magisterial essay on the black (male) intellectual,

defi nes the fundamental aporia that marks his condition. In the emergence
of the black intellectual as a social category, he appears to white society
as a “threatening oxymoron” (330). But the political and epistemological
problems surrounding this figure are not limited to his confrontation with
whites. They extend to the difficult negotiation between élite and popular
strata of black and colonized cultures in the context of liberation struggles.
Posnock notes how Frantz Fanon refused the ideology of authenticity that
characterized Négritude and its elaboration of a black cultural identity,
and opted instead for an ex novo creation of the self in the wake of racism
and colonialism. Posnock’s essay focuses mainly on the figures of W. E. B.
Du Bois and Fanon, arguing that “neither man regarded nationalism or
Négritude as an endpoint or a fi xed identity, rather they were moments,
critical stages, to be worked through to reach a telos of the universal. This
perspective sponsors a raceless society without erasing the historical expe-
rience of racism that unites all black and colonized people” (329). 2 Thus
Posnock examines their efforts to negotiate the “racial particular” and the
“unraced universal,” a tension that seems to run through many writings on
the black intellectual.
This chapter starts from Posnock’s very helpful reflections on the apo-
ria of the black intellectual in order to examine the difficult relationship
between the black and anti-colonial intelligentsia, on the one hand, and the
colonized popular culture, on the other. These problems of negotiation are
well represented in the writing of the Trinidadian George Padmore and
in the Martinican (and subsequently Algerian) Frantz Fanon. Both writ-
ers dedicated much of their lives to anti-colonial activism, and both were
acutely aware of the need for connection, and of the frequent communication
problems, between the élite and popular strata of liberation movements. 3
To cite Posnock again, Fanon strips black “authenticity” of its foundations,
and he tries to demystify the concept of blackness. But in doing so, he
unwittingly creates another problem: he reanimates “the crisis of origins
56 Neelam Srivastava
that perennially attends the figure of the intellectual” (330). In other words,
the intellectual is always seen as déraciné (rootless). Thus the problem of the
black intellectual is a more intensified version of the problem of the progres-
sive/left intellectual, an issue to which Antonio Gramsci dedicated some of
his most salient pages in his Quaderni del carcere [Prison Notebooks]. In this
chapter, I examine the points of contact between the Gramscian notion
of the organic intellectual and Padmore’s and Fanon’s notion of the “colo-
nized” or native intellectual (in Fanon’s terms, “l’intellectuel colonisé”). I
explore the increasing identification between political struggle and national
cultural identity that defi nes Fanon’s later work, and read this as a paral-
lel project to Gramsci’s rethinking of the Italian intellectual’s role in post-

unification Italy and in the fascist era.
The 1950s and 1960s witnessed a transition in conceptions around the
role of the black intellectual, while “the postwar anticolonial conjuncture”
inspired a whole generation of black intellectuals including George Lam-
ming, Richard Wright and E. Franklin Frazier, who observed with admi-
ration the way in which “colonial subjects were becoming new historical
subjects” (Gaines 526). Padmore and Fanon can be said to represent two
different positions on the changing role of the black intellectual. Their dif-
fering stances were connected to the shift in attitudes to Pan-Africanism and
Négritude, both foundational concepts of black nationalism in the earlier
decades of the twentieth century.
It is very likely that Padmore and Fanon actually met in Accra in 1958,
at the fi rst All-African People’s Conference organized by Padmore and
Kwame Nkrumah, the president of the newly independent Ghana. This
conference was an important event in Pan-Africanist politics, and it was
attended by more than three hundred delegates from all over Africa,
including Patrice Lumumba, representatives from the African National
Congress, and of course Fanon (Young, “Fanon and the Turn to Armed
Struggle in Africa” 35). Fanon’s statements in favor of armed struggle in
Algeria at the conference would present a direct challenge to the nonvio-
lent principles of Pan-Africanism.4 On other occasions, Fanon was also
highly critical of Négritude. Fanon’s critique of Négritude was partially
informed by his insistence that the black intellectual understand and
make his the culture of the colonized masses, much in the way Gramsci
insisted that Italian intellectuals discard their internationalist, cosmopoli-
tan tendencies, and instead focus on absorbing the true culture of the Ital-
ian subaltern classes. Fanon was responding to intense cultural debates on
Négritude that were taking place among black intellectuals of that period.
But he was also engaging with the political dimensions of Pan-Africanism,
which had been supported by the earlier generation of black activists such
as Padmore, and he was attacking the quietist attitude that many newly
decolonized African states had towards neo-colonialism and the continu-
ing economic presence of ex-colonial powers in these regions. At the same
The Travels of the Organic Intellectual 57
time, it should be stressed that Fanon was profoundly invested in the idea
of Pan-Africanism, as his essays in Towards the African Revolution demon-
strate. Indeed, as Robert Young argues, Fanon “found no incompatibility
between his nationalism and Pan-Africanism” (“Fanon and the Turn to
Armed Struggle in Africa” 38).
In what follows, I look at Padmore’s most important oeuvre, Pan-African-
ism or Communism? (1956) and at Fanon’s Les damnés de la terre (1961) [The
Wretched of the Earth], examples of what Cedric Robinson problematically
defi nes as “Black Marxist” texts. Fanon and Padmore both distanced them-
selves from orthodox Marxism, though Padmore was much more explicit
about his rejection of Eurocommunism than Fanon was. Both writers, while
acknowledging the profound epistemological and political influence of Marx-
ism on their elaboration of anti-colonial thought and history, also recognized
that Marxism had frequently let down black liberation movements and had
attempted to co-opt their struggles.
It might seem counterintuitive, then, to map out parallels between one of
Europe’s most important Marxist thinkers, one of the founders of the Italian
Communist Party, and Fanon and Padmore. But arguably Gramsci’s empha-
sis on the role of the intellectual both in history and in organizing political
activity valorizes the importance of culture in class struggle. This empha-
sis resonates interestingly with the centrality placed on culture in much
anti-colonial writing, especially that of Fanon, and is an aspect which was
generally overlooked in orthodox Communist assessments of the strength
of anti-colonial movements. 5 What brings together Gramsci, Padmore and
Fanon in this particular conjuncture of leftist thought is the attention paid to
the popular culture of the colonized subalterns as the authentic expression
of a national consciousness and as the essential cornerstone of a successful
program of political emancipation and liberation. In other words, we need to
examine the place of the black colonized intellectual in relation to this situ-
ation, and see how the two thinkers attempt to organize and think through
the “common, if dispersed and contradictory experience of both African and
diaspora responses to the taking away, repression and denial of collective
experience” (Idahosa 393).6
Of course, the word “authenticity” in the context of anti-colonial thought
is fraught with dangers and contradictions. We will examine its use more
carefully in Fanon’s essay “On National Culture,” and we will explore its
complex articulation as a position which owes little to folklore, ethnic nativ-
ism, or racial essentialism. It will be argued that Fanon’s emphasis on cul-
ture, together with his and Padmore’s interrogation of the role of the black
intellectual, represent important conceptual links with Gramsci’s organic
intellectual as he laid it out in his Notebooks, fi rst published in their entirety
in 1975. It might be useful to start with Gramsci’s defi nition of the organic
intellectual, in order to proceed with the startling similarities between his,
Fanon’s and Padmore’s thinking.
Gramsci’s New Intellectual

Gramsci’s long-standing interest in writing a history of intellectuals was to
become a central one in the Notebooks, indissolubly linked to his elaboration
of hegemony, national-popular culture and the political party.
Every social group, coming into existence on the original terrain of an

essential function in the world of economic production, creates together
with itself, organically, one or more strata of intellectuals which give it
homogeneity and an awareness of its own function not only in the eco-
nomic but also in the social and political fields. (SPNB 5)
Gramsci thus immediately links the emergence of social class with the need
to establish functionaries who will articulate and propagate its position in
society and politics. In other words, the role of the intellectual is to help
establish the hegemony of that particular social class. Gramsci notes that the
role of the intellectual is a mediated role, because it is not directly concerned
with the means of production, but rather with the super-structure. Intellectu-
als have “organizing” and “connective” roles, both in civil society (roughly
corresponding to the private sphere), where hegemony is exercised as a form
of social control, and in political society (roughly corresponding to the state
or public sphere), where “direct domination” is exercised through the state
and government. Gramsci sees the intellectuals as “deputies” of the dominant
group, “exercising the subaltern functions of social hegemony and political
government” (SPNB 12). Here, as is often the case in the Notebooks, Gramsci
means “subaltern” in the military sense of “subordinate.” The deputy, that
is, the intellectual, functions as a subordinate “official” who carries out the
“orders” of the chief economic producer of his own social class, for exam-
ple the capitalist entrepreneur (Quaderni del carcere 1513).7 Dominant groups
tend to produce their own organic intellectuals who propagate their ideas
and worldview at a social and cultural level. However, certain oppressed
social groups, for example, the peasants, do not produce organic intellectuals
(Quaderni 1518). Gramsci saw the problem of the intellectuals as a specifically
Italian problem, which was linked to the uneven economic development of
the country. His new conception of the intellectual as “organic” meant that
this person stayed faithful to the interests of the class he belonged to and
was integrated into its specific cultural-political vision, and indeed helped
to establish it as hegemonic. The organic intellectual did not work to build
the hegemony of a superior social class, as was the case of what he calls “tra-
ditional intellectuals,” who tended to live in rural areas (Quaderni 1520–21).
These often came from the petty bourgeoisie or even the peasantry, but
served the interests of the landowners, and the cultural and social outlook of
the traditional intellectual was heavily influenced by the Catholic Church.
With this formulation of intellectual, Gramsci essentially redefi nes this
figure, and expands its remit far beyond the conventional understanding of
someone who is dedicated to cultural, literary and philosophical pursuits.
The intellectual, in Gramsci’s formulation, has an inherently political func-
tion. However, he never divorces the intellectual’s political function from the
cultural function, in fact the two are always seen to be indissolubly linked
in his thinking. In a parenthetical note to his section on the intellectuals,
Gramsci remarks that his research “will not be of a ‘sociological’ nature, but
it will produce a series of essays on the ‘history of culture’ (Kulturgeschichte)
and on the history of political science” (Quaderni 1515). In so doing, Gramsci
democratizes the notion of intellectual, by seeing it as a function, rather than
as a figure: “non-intellectuals do not exist” (SPNB 9). Homo faber cannot be
separated from homo sapiens.

Education figures prominently in this section of Gramsci’s Notebooks. His
history of intellectuals was essentially geared towards the formulation of a
new intellectual, who could “bring into being new modes of thought.” But
this is only possible if people are educated into it. The traditional distinc-
tion between intellectual labor and physical labor must no longer obtain if
we wish to create a new class of intellectuals: these two activities must be
connected and linked into one, creating a “new equilibrium.” Indeed, the
“muscular-nervous effort itself, in so far as it is an element of a general practi-
cal activity, which is perpetually innovating the physical and social world,
becomes the foundation of a new and integral conception of the world”
(SPNB 9). It is clear then that for Gramsci, “organic” means precisely this
complete integration between the physical and the intellectual side of human
nature. He concludes his section on the intellectuals by delineating clearly
the type of education that should form the basis of the new intellectual:
technical-industrial education (Quaderni 1551). However—and he arrives at
this statement through his lengthy discussion of the merits of the Italian edu-
cational system based on the “liceo classico,” somewhat similar to a gram-
mar school— humanism and historicism also need to form the basis of this
new intellectual:
The mode of being of the new intellectual can no longer consist in el-
oquence, which is an exterior and momentary mover of feelings and
passions, but in active participation in practical life, as constructer, or-
ganizer, “permanent persuader” and not as a simple orator (but superior
at the same time to the abstract mathematical spirit); from technique-as-
work one proceeds to technique-as-science and to the humanistic con-
ception of history, without which one remains “specialised” and does not
become “directive” (specialised and political). (SPNB 10)
Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith rightly note that this is a very
dense passage in Gramsci, one that contains in nuce a number of key con-
cepts. First, Gramsci is criticizing the notion of the Italian intellectual, who
in his opinion is still anchored to a belle-lettristic, rhetorical and sentimental
understanding of his role, and one that is completely divorced from the cul-
ture of the people. At the same time, however, Gramsci recognizes the fun-
damental importance of the historicist and humanistic approach in Italian
education in forming the “truly” directive intellectual. What we see here,
then, is a clear identification of the political with the cultural function of the
intellectual. Italian intellectuals have historically been “cosmopolitan” in a
negative sense; they have embraced an internationalist cultural dimension to
the detriment of their connection with Italian indigenous cultural traditions
and expressions, and have thus fatally impeded the development and con-
solidation of this popular-national culture. Fanon similarly remarks on the
“deeply cosmopolitan mentality” of the national bourgeoisie after decoloni-

zation, linking it to its apathy and mediocrity (Wretched of The Earth 98).
There is a conceptual link between Fanon’s critique of the postcolonial
bourgeois intellectual and Gramsci’s critique of the traditional intellectual.
Fanon sees the post-independence middle class in the newly decolonized
country as an underdeveloped bourgeoisie that simply substitutes its erst-
while colonial masters. It is underdeveloped, he argues, because it is not
willing to take risks and invest in the progress, industrialization and better-
ment of the nation the way the European bourgeoisies did in their heyday
(Wretched 100–01). The passivity of this indigenous middle class recalls the
ways in which Gramsci critiques the laziness and conservatism of the Italian
bourgeoisie and ruling class after the Italian unification in 1861. Gramsci’s
verdict on the historic role of the Italian middle class is damning. He consid-
ers it to be timid, conservative and neither capable nor willing to support
the demands of the peasantry for the redistribution of land and wealth, or to
oppose the stifl ing hegemony of the Catholic Church (Liguori and Voza 77).
By contrast, the organic intellectual that Gramsci envisaged—one who would
stay faithful to the cultural and political mandates of his social class, and
who would attempt to channel national-popular culture—relates to Fanon’s
understanding of the postcolonial bourgeois intellectual, as someone who
leads the economic development of the country, “and fi nally pave[s] the way
for a genuine national culture” (Wretched 119).8
Hegemony and the Debates on Marxism

Gramsci’s emphasis on the importance of culture in the construction of a
healthy and functioning political system, and of a successful nation-state,
cannot be overstated enough. Closely linked to his extended and detailed
concern with national culture and literature, is his notion of hegemony, which
at one point he defi nes as “direzione culturale” [cultural directiveness]. A
reading of the relevant sections in the Notebooks suggests that the focus on
culture, and its link with hegemony may have been influenced by his debate
with the Italian philosopher Benedetto Croce on the status of Marxism as a
philosophical current. Croce, a great interlocutor of Gramsci and a constant
addressee of the Notebooks, had accused the “philosophy of praxis” (aka
Marxism) of lacking the ethico-political dimension, and of merely consisting
in a form of economic determinism. In a letter to Tatiana Schucht of 1932 (a
discussion he further develops in Notebook 10), Gramsci notes how Croce’s
historical-political work stresses only what in politics is known as the mo-

ment of “hegemony”, of consensus and cultural leadership, as distinct from
the phase of coercion, whether exercised by legislative or executive pow-
ers, or expressed through police intervention. (Letters from Prison 235)
Here Gramsci defi nes hegemony as “cultural leadership” (“direzione cul-

turale”), foreshadowing the element of “directiveness” that marks the organic
intellectual, in his discussion of the history of intellectuals in Notebook 12
quoted earlier. However, Gramsci disagrees with Croce over the supposed
lack of the ethico-political dimension in Marxism. On the contrary, he argues,
contemporary developments in Marxism, and specifically the thought of
Lenin, have made a significant contribution in reevaluating the moment of
hegemony as essential to Marxist conceptions of the State and in the “valori-
zation” of cultural activity and of a cultural front as a necessary accompani-
ment to the merely political and merely economic ones (Quaderni 1224).
In the Notebooks, Gramsci develops the notion of hegemony as it had
emerged in classical Marxism and in the writings by Lenin. 9 Jonathan Joseph
explains that for Lenin “maintaining a concept of hegemonic struggle is nec-
essary if a mechanical materialism is to be avoided” (2). Gramsci further
confi rms this, arguing that
the greatest modern theorist of the philosophy of praxis [i.e. Lenin],

in the field of political struggle and organization, has, in opposition to
the various “economistic” tendencies, re-valorized the cultural front of
struggle and has constructed the doctrine of hegemony as a complement
of the history of the State as force, and as the contemporary form of the
1848 doctrine of the permanent revolution. (Quaderni 1235)
Hegemony is crucial for restoring the importance of human agency in

political struggle, and “for returning the active political element to history”
( Joseph). For Gramsci, then, hegemony represents Lenin’s single most impor-
tant contribution to Marxism, thus helping it to evolve not only in political
history and economics, but also in philosophy (SPNB 465). He goes so far as
to describe Lenin’s innovation as a great “metaphysical event” (SPNB 357).
Gramsci applies the notion of hegemony to many different contexts: eco-
nomics, culture, religion, anthropology, psychology and linguistics. How-
ever, these distinctions are methodological rather than organic, namely,
hegemony in Gramsci has a stable, core meaning that fi nds different applica-
tions in these different fields (Liguori and Voza 266ff). The bottom line of his
thinking is that cultural hegemony is not separable from political hegemony.
His basic thesis is that “the philosophy of praxis conceives of the reality of
human relations of knowledge as an element of political ‘hegemony’” (Quad-
erni 1245), using the inverted commas around the term almost as if to signify
its status as a conceptual neologism. Hegemony as agency and as cultural
leadership were to be the most important understandings of the term for anti-
colonial struggles. Culture becomes the means of connection to the people,
as well as to the political party (often in exile) that champions anti-colonial
nationalism. It is worth remembering that both Fanon and Padmore wrote
many of their anti-colonial works from exilic locations: Fanon in Tunis, and
Padmore in London.
Anti-Colonial Hegemony and Colonial Domination

Hegemony is often given a negative meaning in critiques of political power
and inequalities. John Chalcraft, following on from Raymond Williams,
remarks that “hegemony is often seen as something imposed on inert masses
from above, whereas Gramsci was ‘above all else . . . a revolutionary strate-
gist . . . [and] championed a political and ideological struggle for hegemony’
in the name of socialism” (9). In what follows, I will use hegemony in its
more positive meaning, as a joint cultural and political operation that seeks
to reconstruct an autonomous popular culture for the colonized that could
counteract its complete negation under colonialism.
Similar to Gramsci, hegemony, for both Fanon and Padmore, was a goal to
be achieved by the leaders and intellectuals of black liberation movements,
working together with the people. Numerous questions arise in relationship
to this. First, can we consider Fanon and Padmore themselves as organic
intellectuals in the Gramscian sense? Is this concept useful for making sense
of their autobiography as postcolonial intellectuals? Padmore, in his history
of the development of Pan-Africanism as a political movement, identified
Marcus Garvey, with his populist racial rhetoric, and W. E. B. Du Bois, with
his much more sophisticated thinking around race, as the twin pole stars
of Pan-Africanism. Padmore, while clearly much more sympathetic to Du
Bois than to Garvey, recognizes that Du Bois never saw himself as a popu-
lar leader and never had the gigantic following that Garvey enjoyed (140).
The issue of connection with the grassroots was very much on Padmore’s
mind, and his own career as publicist and journalist testified to his ongoing
attempts to popularize and disseminate Pan-Africanism as an “accessible”
and alternative ideology for black colonized peoples.10
Second, my discussion explores whether Padmore and Fanon theorized
the black/colonized intellectual in a similar way to Gramsci, and to what
extent they departed from him. This question opens up a larger debate on
the relationship between Third World Marxism and Pan-Africanism, on the
one hand, and Western Marxism on the other.
Third, I wish to ask whether Fanon was consciously influenced by Gram-
sci, or whether he develops his observations independently and in relation-
ship to the colonial context. I also explore the ways in which he develops
and expands on Gramsci’s embryonic conceptions regarding the colonized
peoples and their leadership.
Here it may be relevant to trace the history of Gramsci’s translations
in French in order to gauge to what extent his work circulated among Franco-
phone anti-colonial intellectuals. Translations of Gramsci’s writings did
not appear in France until 1953 and 1955. 1955 was the year in which a
selection of his writings appeared in the French journal Europe, under the
title “L’organisation de l’école et de la culture” (Lussana 1058). This was

an excerpt of Gramsci’s longer work, “Gli intellettuali e l’organizzazione
della cultura” [Intellectuals and the organization of culture], and focused
on the role of the intellectual in political and cultural organization. Thus
it is possible that Fanon could have read these texts, and he may have had
them in mind when he prepared his talk “On National Culture,” presented
in 1959 at the Second International Congress of Black Writers and Artists,
in Rome. To my mind, this essay displays the strongest similarities and
links with the Gramscian understanding of popular-national culture. What
emerges is also a striking parallel between Gramsci’s theorizations of post-
unification Italy and Fanon’s reflections on the postcolonial nations in the
wake of decolonization.
Gramsci is not very explicit about the nature of the relationship
between hegemony and domination that is so crucial in a colonial con-
text; at times, he juxtaposes hegemony, understood as intellectual and
moral directiveness, with “direct domination” (Quaderni 2010). In this
passage, he also argues that hegemonic activity must take place before
the gaining of power on the part of a political movement or party. It is
not enough to count on “the material force that power bestows” in order
to exert an effective leadership (2011). The “brilliant resolution” of this
achievement of hegemonic power on the part of the Italian Moderate
Party at the head of the struggle for Italian unification, meant that the
Risorgimento was a revolution without a revolution, in other words, a
“passive revolution” (Quaderni 2011).11
At other times, however, Gramsci identifies hegemony as a combination
of force and consensus, which constitutes the “normal” exercise of hegemony
in classic parliamentary regimes. It is a
combination of force and consensus that balance each other out in vari-
ous ways, without letting force have the upper hand over consensus, but
on the contrary trying to make it appear as if force is supported by the
consensus of the majority, expressed by the so-called medium of public
opinion—newspapers and associations—which therefore, in certain situa-
tions, are artificially multiplied. (Quaderni 1638)
This passage obviously contains the more negative connotations of hege-
mony. Interestingly, hegemony in the capitalist countries is described by
Fanon, though not in so many words, as juxtaposed to the direct domina-
tion of colonial rule. The “language of pure violence” of the settler is a form
of domination without hegemony, as opposed to the creation of consensus,
through education, “the teaching of moral reflexes,” “aesthetic forms of
respect for the status quo,” in the colonizing country. “In capitalist coun-
tries a multitude of sermonizers, counselors and ‘confusion-mongerers’
intervene between the exploited and the authorities” (Wretched 4). On the
other hand, in the colony, the policeman and the soldier act as go-betweens.
“The agent does not alleviate oppression or mask domination. He displays

and demonstrates them with the clear conscience of the law-enforcer, and
brings violence into the homes and minds of the colonized subject” (4). As
Ato Sekyi-Otu comments, “There is here no mediation of opposition by an
appeal to a shared community and a common humanity. If hegemony is
precisely such a mediation, then the colonial regime is indeed the order of
immediacy, one in which ‘the language of pure violence’ is conspicuous by
its ‘immediate presence’” (86).
Padmore and Fanon through their work and thought can be seen as activ-
ists of an anti-colonial counter-hegemony, or in other words, of a positive
Gramscian notion of hegemony as establishing the dominance of the sub-
altern classes against the dominant forces of that particular society. But as
already mentioned, they were both acutely aware of the problems in commu-
nication between the intellectuals and the masses in anti-colonial struggle,
and they sought to bridge that gap in various ways. The central question,
therefore, was for the native intellectual to create a form of hegemony that
tied him organically to the colonized masses, expressing their political inter-
ests and socio-economic needs. This is also the fundamental question that
Gramsci asks of intellectuals: whether they have a “paternalistic” attitude
toward the proletariat, or whether they believe themselves to be an “organic
expression” of them. “Do they have a ‘servile’ attitude towards the ruling
classes, or do they believe themselves to be directive, an integral part of the
directive classes?” (Quaderni 2041). We could say that this question opens up
the debate around the role of the black intellectual in liberation movements
of the twentieth century, and in particular the reflections of George Padmore
and Frantz Fanon.
The Pan-Africanism of George Padmore

While both men saw mass political emancipation as their common goal,
arguably Padmore belongs to an earlier generation of anti-colonial and
black radicals, a generation that Fanon savagely critiques in The Wretched
of the Earth, for being too removed from the people whose interests they
were supposed to represent. As I will argue later, Fanon’s book was as much
an attack on the pacifi st Pan-Africanism of Senghor and Nkrumah as it
was on European colonialism.12 Thus Fanon’s particular elaboration of the
notion of hegemony and the native intellectual must be understood against
the backdrop of Pan-Africanism and its history. For this reason, I will fi rst
proceed to analyze Padmore’s seminal work, Pan-Africanism or Communism?,
fi rst published in 1956. I focus mainly on this text as a form of “subalternist
history,” which places the black subject fi rmly at the center of his own his-
torical development. In this text, Padmore provides a masterful account of
black nationalism and anti-colonial movements, beginning with the “Back
to Africa” movements of the early nineteenth century through to the most
recent events of Pan-Africanism. The book was the culmination of Pad-

more’s decades-long polemic with, and aversion to, Communism. He had
been expelled from the Comintern in 1934, but in reality it was a case
of mutual disgust; Padmore was thoroughly disillusioned with the way in
which the Communist Party had let down burgeoning anti-colonial move-
ments in Africa and elsewhere, and this book constituted his attempt to
showcase Pan-Africanism as a political theory and praxis that was distinct
and autonomous from Western political thought. His position on Commu-
nism was echoed by Aimé Césaire’s “Letter to M. Thorez,” also published
in 1956, in which he explained his reasons for leaving the French Commu-
nist Party. As Césaire says in his letter, “What I want is for Marxism and
communism to be placed at the service of the Negro peoples, and not the
Negro peoples at the service of Marxism and communism” (156).
In part, the problem of tackling a study of the growth of Pan-Africanism
was where to start. Padmore began by focusing on the birth of Liberia and
Sierra Leone, both founded to host emancipated American slaves. Pan-Afri-
canism, which Padmore also calls “African nationalism,” emerges from Pad-
more’s account as a unique hybrid of nationalism and race consciousness.
One detects a certain slippage in the ways in which Padmore uses this term.
The ambiguities surrounding its meaning are partly due to the fact that the
African diaspora did not have the possibility to make territorial claims on
any physical region of Africa, with the possible exception of Ethiopia, and
of course the extant states of Liberia and Sierra Leone. Thus the hybridity
of Pan-Africanism as a political concept derives from its birth in the forced
diaspora of slavery and in land dispossession.
Padmore also sets Pan-Africanism up as an oppositional political idea
to both capitalism and communism. Obviously, his was very much a Cold
War book in the sense that it sought to affi rm the position of non-alignment,
which many recently decolonized states embraced. “At the moment,” he says
writing in 1956,
none of the African independence movements is influenced by Com-

munism. Indeed this book will show that the struggles of Africans and
peoples of African descent began with their endeavours to establish a
“National Home” on the West African coast nearly a century before
Communist Russia emerged as a power in world politics. (xiii)
Padmore’s construction of an autonomous political subjectivity for Africans

(whether diasporic or native) is not only anti-colonial; by identifying a second
ideological enemy, “Communism,” he further develops this subjectivity as
non-aligned, and contributes to an emerging discourse of “Third-Worldism”
(also known as Tiers-mondisme in French, or Terzomondismo in Italian), which
originated precisely in the years of decolonization.13
In the course of the book, Padmore offers a very rich account of major
players in the foundation of Pan-Africanism, and illuminates the theoreti-

cal debates and dissent that took place among the most well-known repre-
sentatives of the movement. Throughout, we get the sense that Padmore
assigns value to the role of race as a tool of mass political mobilization,
but that it exists ultimately in order to be superseded. While recognizing
the enormous popular appeal of Marcus Garvey (apparently his organiza-
tion, the Universal Negro Improvement Association, boasted 6 million
members by 1923), he also pinpoints the causes of his eventual downfall:
his excessive racialism. Coming as he did from Jamaica, where the degree
of racial mixture with white blood determined a black person’s position
in society (as it did in Martinique), Garvey took a radical stance by reject-
ing any alliances with mixed-race activists and intellectuals in the US,
seeing them as sellouts and middle-class yes-men. Garvey thus alienated
the sympathies of many black leaders, and problematically allied himself
with members of the Ku Klux Klan who supported his “Back to Africa
Movement” and his idea of racial purity (67). Garvey was also a pas-
sionate advocate of capitalism: “Why should not Africa give to the world
its black Rockefeller, Rothschild and Henry Ford?” (Garvey quoted in
Padmore, 83). Padmore ultimately recognizes, however, that Garvey “was
one of the greatest Negroes since Emancipation, a visionary who inspired
his race” (82).
Gramsci himself might have had Marcus Garvey and W. E. B. Du Bois in
mind when he commented on “the formation of a surprising number of negro
intellectuals who absorb American culture and technology” (SPNB 21). In
this very interesting passage, Gramsci relates the role of the intellectual not
only to his nation (as he tends to do in this section of the Notebooks), but to his
race, hypothesizing a future leading role for African American intellectuals
at the head of a cultural and political revolution in Africa. Gramsci, speak-
ing of Africa in frankly racist terms that perhaps derived from the extant
colonialist mindset of the time, felt that these African American intellectuals
could exert an indirect, or even a direct influence on the “backward masses
in Africa” (SPNB 21). But he also mentions Garvey’s “Back to Africa” move-
ment as a second possibility for the influence black American intellectuals
could have on Africans:
That the struggle for the unification of the American people should in-
tensify in such a way as to provoke a negro exodus and the return to
Africa of the most independent and energetic intellectual elements, the
ones, in other words, who would be least inclined to submit to some
possible future legislation that was even more humiliating than are the
present widespread social customs. (SPNB 21)
For him, this development would lead to two fundamental questions on

the consequences of this movement. The fi rst would be a question of a
linguistic nature: would English be the lingua franca of emancipated Afri-
cans, thanks to the leadership role undertaken by African American intel-

lectuals? The second question, more far-reaching and interesting for the
study of Pan-Africanism as a movement that could foster its own organic
intellectuals, concerned the possibility of African nationalism. He asked
whether “this intellectual stratum could have sufficient assimilating and
organizing capacity to give a ‘national’ character to the present primi-
tive sentiment of being a despised race, thus giving the African continent
a mythic function as the common fatherland of all the negro peoples?”
(SPNB 21). This question aligns Gramsci’s thought with that of other Pan-
Africanists such as Padmore who advocated African nationalism as a uni-
fying framework for black liberation struggles, and echoed widely held
beliefs about Africa as an imaginary homeland for black diasporic peo-
ples. Gramsci’s question also links this nationalism to concrete territorial
claims on Africa that began to be made in the second and third decades
of the twentieth century.
But the most fascinating reflections come at the end of this passage. Gram-
sci fi nds that the national and racial spirit of “American negroes” is negative
rather than positive, “one which is a product of the struggle carried on by
the whites in order to isolate and depress them” (SPNB 21). He then links
black nationalism to Zionism: “Liberia, already Americanized and with Eng-
lish as its official language, could become the Zion of American negroes,
with a tendency to set itself up as an African Piedmont” (21). There are two
observations to be made about this passage. First, Gramsci’s obvious referent
here is Marcus Garvey and his “Black Zionist” movement. Second, he reads
black nationalist struggles in terms of Italian history; he sees the potential
role of Liberia as the leader of Africa in analogy to the role played by the
state of Piedmont in leading Italy to independence and unification during
the Risorgimento. It is clear then that Gramsci conceived of these prominent
black intellectuals as organic; but not so much to class or nation, as to race.
But Padmore, writing in 1956, could draw more long-sighted historical
conclusions on the failures of Garveyism. His great hero is W. E. B. Du Bois,
who was the fi rst to conceive of African nationalism as a form of self-de-
termination, individual liberty and democratic socialism (84). Throughout
the book, Padmore envisaged anti-colonial struggle along constitutional and
nonviolent agitation, using the role of the free press and initiating talks with
government officials.
Padmore thus belongs to a different generation of black radicals from
Fanon. He had a great belief in the British parliamentary system; the prob-
lem for him lay with the fact that British colonial administrations were loath
to speed up the process of self-government that so many African colonies
aspired to. He concludes then, “As the British never laid down a time limit
for the working out of this process, the realization of independence depends
on the colonial peoples themselves” (170). This political position, tending
towards accommodation and dialogue with the colonial powers, can be seen
to align Padmore with a more elitist understanding of black politics, and begs
the question to what extent he really was an organic intellectual. Toward the
end of his life, he became Personal Advisor to Nkrumah in the newly formed
state of Ghana (Hooker 132ff). Azinna Nwafor, in an even-handed preface to
Pan-Africanism or Communism?, argues that Pan-Africanism strived to preserve
the status quo of the black political elites and did not serve the interests of
the African colonized masses. On the contrary, Pan-Africanists had chosen a
cooperationist, nonviolent form of anti-colonial action that would ensure the
extension of British interests in Africa, without direct colonial domination.
Nwafor’s words recall the savage attacks of Fanon on the nonviolent methods
of Pan-African socialism in his most famous essay “Concerning Violence.”14
But the Fifth Pan-African Congress held in Manchester in 1945 repre-
sented a turning point, in many ways, for the movement. Padmore indicates
that it seemed to signal a shift in policy from elite to more inclusive forms
of Pan-Africanism, with representation drawn from trade unions and grass-
roots political organizations:
A new militant leadership was reflected, closely linked with the popular
movements in the home lands. Earlier Congresses had centred around
a small intellectual élite. Now there was expression of a mass movement
intimately identified with the under-privileged sections of the coloured
colonial populations. (Padmore 139)
By emphasizing the more popular forms of political participation in the Fifth

Congress, Padmore may have been responding to critics who accused Pan-
Africanism of elitism. Padmore was acutely aware of the need to involve
the wider popular movements in political participation and representation.
He called this the “new phase” of Pan-Africanism, which coincided with
concrete political action on the ground and a closer connection to grass-
roots anti-colonial activists. In words that parallel Gramsci’s emphasis on
organization, Padmore observed that the effectiveness of this new phase of
Positive Action “depended on the degree to which the African people were
organized. Without the active support of the common people, the intellectu-
als remain isolated and ineffectual” (149). The spirit of the Fifth Congress of
Pan-Africanism was embodied in its “Declaration to the Colonial People,”
“which stressed the importance of forming a united front between the intel-
lectuals, workers and farmers in the struggle against Colonialism” (149).
These resolutions were actively taken up by radical and workers’ grassroots
movements in Africa, such as the All-African Trade Union Federation.15 Pad-
more was part of a generation of black radicals, including T. Ras Makon-
nen, C. L. R. James, Harold Moody and Henry Sylvester Williams, who had
fi rst embraced Marxism while in Britain, but had subsequently distanced
themselves from it. Robinson argues that their period of “initiation” in the
metropole was necessary for their anti-imperialist project to come to politi-
cal maturation. Confronted by the duality of “the two Englands—the Eng-

land of the colonies and that of the metropolis”—they developed their own
autonomous brand of anti-colonial politics (Robinson 261). Padmore and
others also greatly appreciated the freedom of association and possibilities
for dissemination of anti-colonial material in Britain; “despite [his] vigorous
opposition to British imperialism, he shared Makonnen’s enthusiasm for the
metropole” (Robinson 263). Padmore’s radicalism reflected the compara-
tive gaze of the colonized intellectual, whose knowledge of the differences
between colony and metropole made him see more clearly how double stan-
dards were applied to British and native subjects.
Nwafor’s preface to Pan-Africanism or Communism? seems to imply that
Padmore was less “advanced” than Fanon, who had a more acute sense of
the failures of the black political intelligentsia towards the colonized masses
of Africa. This suggests that this black intelligentsia didn’t have such a strong
hegemonic presence among the masses, and perhaps failed to develop and
cultivate its own influence sufficiently. However, we should not forget that
Padmore’s magisterial oeuvre produced one of the most authoritative his-
tories of black political and liberationist movements available at the time;
he was an erudite and committed scholar of this history. Carol Polsgrove
reminds us that Padmore’s successful publication of his extensive writings
was an achievement in and of itself. He and other anti-colonial writers of
the time “did not control the discursive machinery that defi ned them as
powerless and undeserving of power. Thus, in producing a book at all with
the expectation of publication, they challenged the status quo and their low
place in it” (7).
“On National Culture”

Pan-Africanism or Communism? does for Pan-Africanism what Jawaharlal
Nehru’s The Discovery of India (1946) did for Indian historiography in the
period of decolonization: it challenged the colonial monopoly on the histori-
cal narrative of the colonized subject, and placed this subject at the centre of
his own history. Moreover, Padmore’s critique of Communism was very far-
reaching and very necessary; he foreshadowed Robinson’s statement that we
cannot understand black radicalism as a mere variant of Western radicalism
whose proponents happen to be black. However, what we notice is Padmore’s
almost exclusive preoccupation with the political aspects of Pan-Africanism.
We know that his disgust with Communism stemmed from his realization
that its support for anti-colonial movements was far from disinterested, and
that racial solidarity was a key factor in creating Pan-Africanism as an auton-
omous movement. But as we turn to Fanon, we see that among the black
radicalists, he was the one who most extensively theorized the role of culture
in anti-colonial movements.
In the Gramscian spirit, the focus on culture cannot be divorced from
that of political engagement. Fanon’s “black Marxism” in The Wretched of the

Earth, by incorporating a materialist focus on culture as part of its anti-colo-
nial project, can also be said to have constituted the real future of Marxism
in the postwar years. The great innovation of black/Third Worldist Marxism
was the insight that black, colonized, African revolutionary culture “implied
. . . that bourgeois culture and thought and ideology were irrelevant to the
development of revolutionary consciousness among Black and other Third
World peoples. It broke with the evolutionist chain in, the closed dialectic of,
historical materialism” (Robinson 275). Quite clearly, then, what Padmore’s
brand of Pan-Africanism may not have achieved was the establishment of
a successful counter-hegemony that combined political leadership with cul-
tural decolonization. If establishing hegemony meant affi rming the agency
of the political subject over the forces of history, then we can see how later
theorists of Third-Worldism, such as Amilcar Cabral and Frantz Fanon, pin-
pointed much more clearly the necessary nexus between hegemony, political
leadership and an organic connection with the culture of the colonized.
Cabral, like Padmore, took exception to Marxism for its doctrinal
inflexibility in analyzing Third World struggles. The African peasants and
nomadic communities were not outside history, as orthodox Marxism would
imply, simply because they did not correspond to the Marxist notion of the
“proletariat.” On the contrary, these two thinkers were more than able to
bring about revolution, and take agency for their own history (Cabral 77ff).
Fanon and Cabral were critical of Pan-Africanism as kowtowing too heavily
to colonial interests and to the neo-colonial elites. At the same time, they
continued the innovative and creative take on Marxism begun by Padmore,
C. L. R. James, and others, and sought to infuse it with their own experi-
ence of Third World anti-colonial struggles. But most importantly, Fanon
developed an analogous project to Gramsci in his reworking of Marxism-
Leninism, assigning a central role to the revalorization of native culture on
the part of the colonized/native intellectual. We shall explore below the links
between Fanon’s passionate attack on the colonized intellectual’s lingering
cultural ties with Europe, on the one hand, and Gramsci’s indictment of the
Italian cosmopolitan intellectual, and his lack of connection with national-
popular culture of the Italian masses, on the other. Both identify this lack of
organicity as a fundamental political weakness that poses a real risk to the
success of the socialist revolution.
Gramsci’s cosmopolitan intellectual, as we have seen, was unable to or
uninterested in building a popular-national culture for Italy that drew on
the lived experience of the people, and was deracinated from the social
class that he was meant to represent. Fanon’s “colonized” intellectual, with
his ties to Europe, was deracinated from his race. For both, then, identity
emerges as a problem. But both Fanon and Gramsci were concerned with
the formation of a new intellectual. Fanon in particular develops his ideas
about the native intellectual in relationship to his idea of a new human-
ism. Fanon and Gramsci’s writing displays some striking stylistic similari-
ties: like Gramsci, Fanon mixed political analysis with literary and cultural
criticism. This multidisciplinary form of writing suggests an emphasis on
culture and politics together.
Fanon dedicates the central part of the book to an analysis of the “intel-
lectuel colonisé.” Constance Farrington’s translation of The Wretched of the
Earth seems to have overlooked the wider meaning of Fanon’s choice of term
here, by rendering it as the “native intellectual.” But it is surely more accu-
rate to speak here of “colonized intellectual” (in line with Richard Philcox’s
more recent translation), where the defi ning condition is not so much race
or ethnicity, but colonialism. A translation of Fanon’s phrase as “colonized
intellectual” renders much more clearly the transformation that this figure
must undergo in order to become an organic intellectual, and also gestures
towards the possibility of transcending race. Indeed, the “intellectuel colo-
nisé” is someone who must abandon his Europeanized education, but also
any attachment to a racialist, essentialist identity (à la Négritude). Construct-
ing a real, authentic and vital national culture means eliminating colonialism
from one’s mental and psychological makeup through the war of liberation:
“After the struggle is over, there is not only the demise of colonialism, but
also the demise of the colonized” (Wretched 178). The colonized intellectual
will no longer exist in a postcolonial future in which the political and psycho-
logical effects of oppression no longer exist, and will be replaced by a “new
humanity” (Wretched 178). In order for this new humanity to be free of the
“cultural indecisiveness” that plagues many newly independent countries, it
must be entirely supported by the will and concerted efforts of the people.
Fanon emphasizes inventiveness, not a return to tradition, as constitutive of a
truly decolonized national culture (179). For Fanon, as for Gramsci, “authen-
ticity” does not consist of tradition.
Négritude’s essentialist conception of blackness “fi nds its fi rst limita-
tion” in the fact that racial identity is historically constructed (Wretched
154), as Fanon had already stated in Black Skin, White Masks. The prob-
lems that Richard Wright or Langston Hughes had to face were very dif-
ferent from those of Léopold Senghor and Jomo Kenyatta. Here Fanon was
referring to the debate between Wright and Senghor, which took place
at the First World Congress of Black Writers and Artists in 1956. Wright
felt Négritude represented an exclusionary cultural approach that didn’t
take into consideration Black Americans’ economic and social conditions
(Macey 286). Interestingly, Gramsci was more prescient than Senghor in
recognizing the impact that the advanced industrialization of America
would have in shaping the responses of African American intellectuals, as
I have discussed earlier.
At the same time, however, the colonized intellectual must immerse him-
self in the native culture in order not to become deracinated. If this tearing
away from colonial culture is not accomplished, the result will be “individu-
als without an anchorage, without borders, colorless, stateless, rootless—a

body of angels” (Fanon, Wretched 155). This last figure resembles Gramsci’s
cosmopolitan intellectual and his responsibility in failing to create an organic
form of literature for the nation. In a note entitled “The non popular-national
character of Italian literature,” he speaks of a
historically determined separation between intellectuals and nation . . .

a fragmentation that is a consequence of their separation from the peo-
ple-nation and of the fact that the emotive “content” of art, the cultural
world, is disconnected from the deep currents of national-popular life,
which itself remains fragmented and without expression. Every intellec-
tual movement becomes or returns to being national if a “going to the
people” has taken place . . . Even if one has to begin by writing “serial
novels” and sentimental poetry, without a period of going to the people
there can be no Renaissance and no national literature. (Prison Notebooks 3:
319; my translation in italics)
This passage by Gramsci emphasizes the importance of “going to the peo-

ple” (“andata al popolo”) in order to recuperate the lost ties to native culture,
a sentiment echoed in Fanon’s account of the “colonized literature,” or lit-
térature colonisée (Wretched 150). Gramsci also indicates that there are stages
in this approach to native culture, and that one might have to begin by writ-
ing avowedly popular novels and “versi da melodramma,” melodramatic,
sentimental verse. This “stagist” idea of a return to, and recuperation of,
native literature is also present in Fanon’s outline of the three phases (“un
panorama en trois temps”) in the evolution of the colonized writer of fiction
(écrivain colonisé). His emphasis on culture and literature in this essay was
due to the fact that Fanon delivered part of it at the Second Congress of
Black Writers and Artists in Rome in 1959. Richard Wright’s perception of
the limits of Négritude at the First Congress prepared the ground for Fanon’s
impassioned attack in “On National Culture.” Fanon also suggested that the
nativist celebration of African culture went hand in hand with the political
quietism and compromise of African bourgeois nationalists towards the ex-
colonial powers. The priorities of the Second Congress were also different
from the fi rst one; rather than Négritude, the focus was now on the responsi-
bility of the black intellectual.
For Fanon, the fi rst phase in the evolution of the colonized intellectual
is the period of assimilation, in which the colonized writer adheres entirely
to the literature of the metropole in terms of style and trends, and produces
derivative models from the West. The second phase, which Fanon defi nes as
the “period of remembrance,” is a result of the colonized plunging back into
his own culture, and attempting to remember the folklore and traditions that
he had cast aside in his period of Westernization. But all he can do, at this
stage, is remember, because he is not integrated into his own people and has
only external relations to them (Les damnés de la terre, 268). This detached
and sentimental memorialization is profoundly reminiscent of Gramsci’s Ital-
ian cosmopolitan intellectual, who unconsciously adopts a paternalistic atti-
tude towards national-popular culture.
But then the third period begins, and here Fanon connects a revolutionary
approach to culture with national struggle. He defi nes the literary produc-
tion of this period as a “combat literature,” a revolutionary literature, which
for him becomes synonymous with national literature (Wretched 159). It is
here, however, that Fanon issues a warning to the colonized intellectual: he
must be wary of the methods he uses in his cultural operation. Fanon uses
terms that are strikingly similar to Gramsci’s: the “going to the people” that
Gramsci saw as key to the construction of a national-popular literature, is
rendered as the intellectual “returning to his people” (Wretched 160, “qui
revient à son peuple” in the original French, 269). The colonized intellectual
must be wary of the literary techniques and language that he uses for writing
a new national literature, as he runs the risk of exoticizing the very culture
and society he wishes to represent most faithfully and passionately. At all
costs, he must avoid acting like a foreigner, and he must go beyond a mere
superficial relationship to the constantly changing cultural parameters of the
people in the revolution.
The most innovative aspect of Fanon’s thought in these passages is his
understanding of the way in which national liberation struggles utterly trans-
form the culture of the colonized. Just like Gramsci, Fanon realized that
national culture is not merely a recuperative operation. There is no hidden,
ancient essence of the people that the intellectual must tap in order to pro-
duce national culture. On the contrary, Fanon stresses how the revolution is
transforming the culture of the people in its very making. To echo Cabral, the
people make their own history, but they also, constantly make their own cul-
ture: “a dense, subterranean life in perpetual renewal” (Wretched 160). Fanon
here makes an absolutely fundamental juxtaposition: culture versus custom.
“Culture has never the translucency of custom. In its essence, it is the very
opposite of custom, which is always the deterioration of culture” (Wretched
160). Fanon’s stark rejoinder to the proponents of Négritude (and by exten-
sion, Pan-Africanism) is never more evident than in this passage. Brilliantly,
Fanon rejects this cultural movement as containing all the perils associated
with nativism, including conservative forms of cultural revivalism and the
stolid defense of “native customs” against a true liberation of the indigenous
people from both colonial and pre-colonial oppression. The colonized intel-
lectual must avoid being hypnotized by the “mummified fragments” of native
culture, which are static and outworn. Fanon identifies true national culture
as being forged in the smithy of the revolution: “When a people support an
armed or even political struggle against a merciless colonialism, tradition
changes meaning . . . Traditions in an underdeveloped country undergoing
armed struggle are fundamentally unstable and crisscrossed by centrifugal
forces” (Wretched 160). The foundations of popular national culture are to be

found in the lived experience of anti-colonial revolution.
Fanon underlines that the people’s culture has not remained static, thanks
to modern techniques of information, language and dress that have dialec-
tically reorganized the “mind of the people” and that the traditions which
remained intact during the colonial period are now undergoing extremely
radical changes (Wretched 160). Though Fanon is arguing that narratives of
radical social and cultural change do not have to be narratives of “progress”
in the Western sense, unconsciously he may be bringing a “modernizing”
perspective to his discussion here, at least in part. The colonized intellectual
must avoid folklore, custom, outmoded examples of native culture; rather,
he must realize that “national truth is fi rst and foremost the national reality”
(Wretched 161). Fanon advocates an almost telepathic, alchemistic connec-
tion between the intellectual and the popular culture of the nation in flux:
“It is not enough to be reunited with the people in a past where they no
longer exist. We must rather reunite with them in their recent counter move
which will suddenly call everything into question”; it is in this “zone of hid-
den fluctuation where the people can be found” (Wretched 163) (the French
original has “ce lieu de déséquilibre occulte,” 273). Here again we fi nd a
parallel with Gramsci’s dynamic “andata al popolo,” the intellectual going
to the people, in enhanced and poeticized form, set against the backdrop of
the anti-colonial struggle. It is not clear whether the intellectual would then
“fuse” with the people or remain in some senses distinct from it. But it seems
like Fanon had the former in mind. He uses the verb “revenir” to indicate
the intellectual’s reconnection with his own culture, that of the people. His
organic relationship to the people can be linked to Gramsci’s idea that we
must understand the role of intellectuals as merely a specialization of a qual-
ity inherent to all mankind: “Non-intellectuals do not exist” (SPNB 9). The
intellectual embodies in an intensified form what all the people possess and
know already.
Fanon’s rejection of custom and celebration of national culture as inher-
ently dynamic and shifting reveals the intellectual’s return to the “people”
as a careful balancing act. Fanon’s very choice of lexicon here is also eerily
reminiscent of Gramsci’s complex treatment of “folklore” in the Notebooks. He
also outlines two different types of folklore, or “popular religion” as he also
calls it, or rather he identifies different strata that constitute it:
The fossilized strata that reflect past conditions of life, and thus [are]
conservative and reactionary, and those that consist of a series of in-
novations, often creative and progressive, spontaneously determined by
forms and conditions of life in the process of developing, and which con-
tradict, or are merely different from, the morality of the leading groups.
(Quaderni 2313)
Gramsci rejects the received notion of folklore as picturesque and quaint, and
instead emphasizes the active popular spirit inherent in it, which is clearly
distinct from that of the traditional intellectuals. Giovanni Mimmo Boninelli
comments that folklore in Gramsci has these two sides to it: on the one hand,
it has the negative connotations of being regressive, conservative and passive.
On the other hand, however, it “spontaneously produces positive, progressive,
innovative fragments, which are active among those sectors of the population
which are able to express their own ‘organic intellectuals’” (322). Boninelli
thus identifies in Gramsci a link between the producers of an active and inno-
vative folklore, and the creation of organic intellectuals, a position that is
echoed by Fanon’s insistence that the colonized intellectual gain access to that
“zone of hidden fluctuation” that is the true repository of national culture: a
dynamic, rather than passive understanding of this culture. It is only through
an active revalorization of folklore that the organic intellectual can act in
order to counter-act the social hegemony and consensus that govern that par-
ticular society (Boninelli 322).
For Fanon, as for Gramsci then, the intellectual’s true comprehension of
the “people’s culture” consists in demystifying it. Demystification is necessary
in the case of folklore, which is otherwise seen in a rather Orientalist light,
a form of self-exoticization and self-distancing. The real point of connection
here between Gramsci and Fanon is that both thinkers are addressing the
intellectuals of the same nation to which the people belong. In other words,
the process of reconnection and demystification must begin at home, a very
difficult operation that must discard most, if not all, of the previous intel-
lectual and cultural education received at the hands of the metropole. As
Fanon says, “A national culture is no folklore where an abstract populism is
convinced it has uncovered the popular truth” (Wretched 168). Moreover, the
birth of a true national literature signifies a change in readership: whereas
before the colonized writer produced work for the European oppressor, now
he “gradually switches over to addressing himself to his own people. It is
only from this point onward that one can speak of a national literature”
(Wretched 173). Gramsci also argued that the preference of Italian readers
for foreign popular fiction, rather than homegrown middlebrow authors, was
the most evident proof of a disconnect between the writers and the public in
Italy. Italians considered foreign literature more relevant and interesting to
them than their own national literature. This fact leads Gramsci to another
conclusion: that the literature of a people can come from a different national
context, in other words, a people can be subject to the intellectual and moral
hegemony of other peoples. Thus the very taste of a national readership is
intimately linked to issues of cultural, and thus political hegemony (Lettera-
tura e vita nazionale 98).
Fanon gives some examples in the text of what he means by an authentic
national literature, though he is remarkably vague as to which national con-
text he is referring to. His only example of “combat literature” is from the
Guinean poet Keita Fodeba, and he also briefly mentions the evolution of
jazz. However Macey, in his excellent discussion of Fanon’s essay, offers some
suggestions of what Fanon may have had in mind. Kateb Yacine, Mouloud
Feraoun and Assia Djebar are some of the Algerian writers who began to
represent the Algerian war in fiction and poetry in new and experimental
ways (Macey 382ff). The use of vernacular languages or popular theatre
may also have been a way for colonized writers to reach a wider audience, as
colonialism had tended to defi ne the potential linguistic audience for culture
through its exclusive focus on literature in French, often consigning Algerian
production to “folklore.”
Fanon, throughout the essay, constantly insists that only the fight for nation-
hood can “unlock” culture; it is the “material matrix on the basis of which
culture becomes possible” (my own translation, 280 in the French original).
National Algerian culture, for example, gains consistency in the course of the
struggle, in the myriad sites of resistance: in front of the guillotine, in prison,
in every French outpost that is captured and destroyed. Thus it is the fight
for national liberation that opens to national culture “the doors of creation”
(Wretched 197). In short, the war of liberation itself is an expression of culture.
“We believe the conscious, organized struggle by a colonized people in order
to restore national sovereignty constitutes the greatest cultural manifestation
that exists” (178). As in Gramsci, the struggle for political leadership is iden-
tified with a struggle for cultural hegemony. Fanon, like Gramsci, assigns a
wide semantic field to the intellectual that extends from political activist to
writer and man of culture. But his achieved fusion with the subaltern group
he wishes to represent is essential for the success of the revolution.
Fanon is careful to distinguish his idea of national culture from that of
Négritude: “To believe one can create a black culture is to forget oddly
enough that ‘Negroes’ are disappearing, since those who created them are
witnessing the demise of their economic and cultural supremacy” (Wretched
169). Fanon’s dismissal of Négritude may have been linked to the fact that
this movement was largely irrelevant to the Algerian situation (Macey 378).
In fact, “Arab culture,” identified with that of the invading nomadic tribes
from the north, was regarded as suspect by Sub-Saharan cultural theorists.
Négritude is seen as static and essentialist, whereas Fanon makes it clear that
the condition of colonization is temporary, both for the colonizer and for
the colonized, and it does not establish immoveable racial identities. On the
contrary, the struggle for national freedom results in a tabula rasa regarding
previous culture and customs; “this struggle, which aims at a fundamental
redistribution of relations between men, cannot leave intact either form or
substance of the people’s culture” (Wretched 178). Thus, in a typically utopian
vein Fanon returns to the notion of a new humanity, which will be the end
result of the anti-colonial liberation struggle. This position also signals an
evolution from Black Skin, White Masks, in which Fanon had been so critical
of Sartre’s defi nition of Négritude as a “racist anti-racism.” In 1953, while rec-
ognizing that black racial identity was historically constructed by the white
gaze, he also felt that it was nevertheless here to stay, at least until racism
existed (Bernasconi 107). In The Wretched of the Earth he is much more opti-
mistic. The disappearance of colonialism—understood as a psycho-cultural
hegemony as much as a political one—will mean the end of the colonized
man, and thus possibly the end of racial difference. Where for Gramsci the
new society of socialism meant the end of social classes, for Fanon it meant
the end of race, and its replacement by the nation, presumably in non-ethni-
cally exclusive terms. More realistically, Macey reminds us that after Alge-
rian independence in 1962, the FLN established Algerian nationality on the
basis of ethnicity and adherence to the Muslim religion (389).
That Gramsci and Fanon’s leanings toward utopianism were born out of
their conditions of exile and imprisonment is very possible. Gramsci devel-
oped his notion of the organic intellectual and his role in the creation of a
national culture, in the context of fascism, imagining the rebirth of an Ital-
ian nation that would overcome the failed revolution of the Risorgimento.
Fanon, on the other hand, and to a lesser extent Padmore, develop their
notion of the black/colonized intellectual and his role in anti-colonial move-
ments, in the context of colonialism, and they link it to the need to re-think
colonized culture as distinct from that of the colonizer.
My discussion of the intellectual in Fanon’s and Padmore’s writings has
left open the question as to whether they could be considered as organic
intellectuals themselves. In a way, that might lead us to ask whether Gram-
sci saw himself as an organic intellectual. He discussed at length the type
of cultural and political work an intellectual must undertake in order to
become “organic”; but did he recognize his own work and life in this set of
prescriptions? Perhaps we may perceive all three thinkers along the lines
of how Gramsci spoke of Niccolò Machiavelli. Gramsci found that Machia-
velli combined both the pragmatic and the philosophical aspects of politics:
he wasn’t only a political scientist, but a “partisan, a man of powerful pas-
sions, an active politician, who wishes to create a new balance of forces and
therefore cannot help concerning himself with what ‘ought to be’” (SPNB
172). One gets the impression that Gramsci may be thinking of himself here,
as someone who engages with effective reality, understood as a constantly
shifting, dynamic relation of forces, rather than something fi xed and static.
Machiavelli (and possibly Gramsci, Fanon and Padmore) could be described
then as “realistic” individuals—
realistic even if it did not in fact become direct reality, since one cannot
expect an individual to change reality but only to interpret it and to in-
dicate the possible lines of action . . . Machiavelli never says that he has
any thought or intention of himself changing reality—only of showing
concretely how the historical forces ought to have acted in order to be
effective. (SPNB 173)
Notes
1. I would like to thank Jim House, Carolyn Pedwell, and Robert Young for their
helpful and constructive comments on previous drafts of this chapter.
2. Relevant to this discussion is the way Fanon took exception to Sartre’s critique
of Négritude as an “anti-racist racism,” in Black Skin, White Masks (132). Fanon
strongly contested Sartre’s easy dismissal of a cultural and psychological posi-
tion that “asks Blacks unilaterally to renounce the pride of their colour” (Berna-
sconi 108).
3. See especially Fanon’s essay “The Trials and Tribulations of National Con-
sciousness” in The Wretched of the Earth, where he examines the betrayal of the
newly liberated African masses on the part of élite middle-class nationalists,
in the wake of decolonization (97–98). Paul Idahosa also discusses how Fanon
and C. L. R. James tackled the difficult issue of how the black intelligentsia
could effectively channel the collective experience of racism, marginalization
and economic exploitation of blacks in the colonies and elsewhere.
4. Indeed, “moved by the words of the future author of The Wretched of the Earth,
the conferees passed a resolution justifying violence by nationalists when vio-
lence was thrust upon them” (Polsgrove 160).
5. Generally, the Communist Party had little comprehension for the strength of
cultural nationalisms in anti-colonial struggles. The CP tended to condemn
these nationalist parties as expressions of petty bourgeois and landed interests.
M. Thorez and Velio Spano, two Communist Party members who operated
in colonial Tunisia (Thorez would eventually go on to become the leader of
the French Communist Party), were scathing of the Tunisian nationalist party,
Destour, which refused any alliances with the CP, and accused it of privileging
their ethnic and nationalist particularisms over an alliance with the French pro-
letariat (Mattone 58).
6. As is obvious from this discussion, the debate on the black colonized intellec-
tual in the work of Gramsci, Padmore, and Fanon is entirely gendered. There
is almost no explicit acknowledgement of the fact that the intellectual is always
male in their discussions.
7. When possible, I use available English translations of the Notebooks. All other
translations from Gramsci are my own.
8. In what follows, I will be using Richard Philcox’s 2004 translation of The
Wretched of the Earth.
9. See Perry Anderson’s “The Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci” for a thorough
discussion of the origin of the term in Russian Communism and its influence
on Gramsci’s elaboration of it. As Anderson remarks, hegemony “was one of
the most widely-used and familiar notions in the debates of the Russian labor
movement before the October Revolution,” and lived on in the documents of
the Communist International, which Gramsci was familiar with (17–18). Derek
Boothman also discusses the sources of the concept of hegemony in Gramsci
(2011).
10. Carol Polsgrove has an excellent discussion of Padmore’s career as a journalist
in her book Ending British Rule in Africa: Writers in a Common Cause (2009).
11. The applicability of the “passive revolution” to postcolonial transfers of power
has been remarked upon most famously by Partha Chatterjee in his analysis of
Indian nationalist thought, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Deriva-
tive Discourse?
12. See Robert Young’s discussion of Fanon’s essay “On Violence” as a riposte to
the compromising strategy of certain Pan-Africanists, in Postcolonialism: An His-
torical Introduction, and in “Fanon and the Turn to Armed Struggle in Africa,”
Wasafiri 44 (Spring 2005): 33–41.
13. The French demographer and historian Alfred Sauvy is credited with coining
the phrase “Tiers monde” [Third World] in an article of August 14, 1952 for
L’Observateur. Sauvy locates the conceptual space of the Third World as equally
oppressed by capitalism and communism, echoing Padmore’s position.
14. Unsurprisingly, Nwafor’s preface to Padmore’s book was written in 1971, when
the relative failure of Pan-Africanism in decolonized African states had become
very evident.
15. Opoku Agyeman traces the history of this important association, and its ulti-
mate failure to establish a popular Pan-Africanism, in The Failure of Grassroots
Pan-Africanism: The Case of the All-African Trade Union Federation (2003).
4 The Secular Alliance
Gramsci, Said and the
Postcolonial Question 1
Baidik Bhattacharya
The crisis of “postcolonialism” or “postcolonial theory” is well known

(Loomba; Yaeger; Miguel). The curious point about this crisis is that it is
never conceptualized as a singular event and is frequently understood as the
corollary of a new mastercode—globalization—that supposedly subsumes the
possibilities opened up by postcolonial politics in the second half of the last
century (Robertson; Appadurai; Hardt and Negri; Mbembe). In a rather
heuristic schematization, these descriptions can be divided into two clus-
ters—the fi rst one argues that postcolonial politics loses its topicality because
its contradictions (which were the legacies of the age of empire) are resolved
through a metapolitical assemblage called globalization; and the second one
proposes that postcolonial politics is no longer relevant since its possibilities
have been transformed, for better or worse, under the aegis of globalization
as it converts every sectoral political claim into a planetary one. Irrespective
of the overall orientation of such arguments—celebratory or elegiac—there
emerges a fundamental agreement across the board on the peripheral nature
and inconsequence of postcolonial politics in the globalized world of today.
This line of argument often synthesizes various theoretical schools and politi-
cal agendas, and more often than not positions itself within a critical crevice
that is designed to attend to the new and the as-yet unthought. A case in
point is Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s prognosis of the subordination
and eventual demise of the postcolonial nation-state and the rise of a new
global order they call “empire”:
The final link that explains the necessary subordination of the postcolonial
nation-state, however, is the global order of capital. The global capitalist
hierarchy that subordinates the formally sovereign nation-states within its
order is fundamentally different from the colonialist and imperialist cir-
cuits of international domination. The end of colonialism is also the end
of the modern world and modern regimes of rule. (Empire 134)
It follows from their argument that this new form of domination demands
new sociological description and political orientation. The vistas offered by
The Secular Alliance 81
postcolonial theory are not simply inadequate to address the newness of
empire/globalization, but are woefully outdated. What is even more danger-
ous, Hardt and Negri suggest, the mutated postmodern power—“imperial
sovereignty” in their words—actually thrives on the cherished ideals of post-
colonial (and postmodernist) theory: “[M]odern forms of sovereignty would
no longer be at issue, and the postmodernist and postcolonialist strategies
that appear to be liberatory would not challenge but in fact coincide with and
even unwittingly reinforce the new strategies of rule” (Empire 138).
The undemanding equation between postcoloniality and the postcolonial
nation-state in Hardt and Negri’s formulation is easy to detect; and this erro-
neous equivalence between a philosophical position and a political structure

animates most accounts of the death of postcolonialism or postcolonial the-
ory. What is much more difficult to identify, and hence much more insidious
in their theorization of the contemporary, is the model of collusion they set
up between such accounts of death that offer no way out from a landscape
of political sterility of the contemporary world and the theoretical narratives
that allegedly flourish on and celebrate such an impasse; the model is erected
only to exploit the fissures of the latter, only to suggest that within the mis-
leading will to theorize the false enemy resides the correct understanding of
contemporary political order. This is most prominent in the way they theorize
the new political subject of global democracy, that is, “multitude,” toward the
end of their treatise. It is only through a strategic erasure of the nation-state
(postcolonial and otherwise) that they can insert a further category of multi-
tude below and behind the people; the association here, unlike other forms
of associational life, is subterranean, rhizomic and unregulated. Whether in
its demand for global citizenship and social wage, or whether in its aspiration
for a proletarian telos and the singularity of “posse,” the global multitude can
only assert itself in a space that exists beyond the territorial sovereignty of
the nation-state. This space below and behind the people, as an exterior to
it, enables the multitude to avoid the networks of the nation-state and further
to strategize with the global structures of domination and exploitation. The
esteemed principles of postcolonial theory like ambiguity, hybridity, margin-
alization, fragmentation, and so on, are unable to track this new form of social
life; they are rather the tools through which the empire functions and tries to
trap the radical potential of the multitude. It is not that Hardt and Negri do
not recognize the considerable critical energy that went into the questioning
of the nation-state in postcolonial scholarship, it is not even the case that they
are blind to the fruits of non-nationalist political struggles all over the post-
colonial world in the second half of the twentieth century; rather, they insist
that such scholarship and political program offer limited insights into the
contemporary order of things, and, as a curious afterthought, they unprob-
lematically reduce the politics of postcoloniality to anti-colonial nationalism.
In their schematic reading, the only outcome of decolonization is the state
that unfailingly traps the nation within its Manichean apparatuses—“the state
82 Baidik Bhattacharya
is the poisoned gift of national liberation” (Empire 134)—and postcolonialist theo-
rization is a rubber stamp that unimaginatively endorses this history. The
empire as a global system and multitude as a possible antithesis, in other
words, remain beyond the purview of postcoloniality; the initial promises of
decolonization petered out rather easily.
I begin with Hardt and Negri not because they are the only ones to voice
such discomfort with postcolonialism, not even to suggest that theirs is the
most attractive of all the available accounts, but because in many ways their
critique captures and concludes a long series of attacks (e.g., Appiah; Ahmad;
Dirlik; Brennan’s Wars of Position), and brings into sharp focus some of the
major charges against postcolonial theory over the years. I also open this
essay with their account since it gives me the perfect opportunity to revisit
the influence of Antonio Gramsci on postcolonial critical thinking. The way
they formulate the multitude, and the way they set it beyond the pale of the
modern nation-state as a necessary precondition, one would have hoped that
they would at least acknowledge similar moves in the two branches of critical
thinking heavily influenced by Gramsci—cultural studies and postcolonial
theory—not so much as guiding templates but as cognate theoretical maneu-
verings. It is indeed a curious elision given the enormous scholarship in
both disciplines on the Gramscian notions of “nation-people,” “hegemony,”
the “subaltern,” and “passive revolution” that has been preoccupied with
the release of the “popular” from the strict conscription of the nation, and
that has been relentless in probing the coercive mechanism of the modern
nation-state. The suggestive split within the nation-people in Gramsci’s work,
and its re-appropriation within specific postcolonial locations, indeed can be
reworked to theorize an alternative genealogy of postcolonial critical think-
ing and its relationship with the contemporary phase of globalization.
In this chapter I offer a set of postcolonial speculations through the works
of Edward W. Said and Gramsci to break free of weary terms of the debate,
and also to suggest that postcolonial theory at its foundation and genealogy
offers alternative ways to think about the philosophical questions raised by
the contemporary phase of globalization. The arguments here are specula-
tive in nature not because they lack conviction, rather because they take
globalization as an unfolding saga and engage with it from a position of
contingency. This location of my arguments—that is, postcolonial and in-
globalization—I hope would lend them the spirit of, to quote one of Gramsci’s
favorite phrases from Marx, theory as “material force” (SPNB 333) as they
engage with an unfi nished structure and become part of a continuous and
oppositional critique of it.2 The speculative theories I propose here are based
on Said and Gramsci; the link between the two is obvious. Said has repeat-
edly cited Gramsci as one of the chief intellectual influences on his work,
so much so that Mustapha Marrouchi describes Gramsci as Said’s maître à
penser (39). My own reading here avoids the obvious connections between
the two, or the popular concepts on which they have been discussed together.
Rather, in this chapter I follow two non-national and secular possibilities in
their respective works, and I try to show how at unexpected junctures they
often come together to think of a critical tradition whose vocation is worldly
as well as global. The point is worth repeating since despite their repeated
critique of the nation-form, the political discussion of Gramsci and Said have
often been reduced to two failures of the national project—Italy and Pales-
tine, respectively—and they have been portrayed as apostles of failed nation-
alities. In the following pages I do not try to summarize the globalization
debate through these two authors; rather I try to present possibilities in their
writing that may open up new horizons for the debate.
Trajectories of the Secular

The influence of Gramsci has been felt most conspicuously in two disci-
plines—literary studies and history—and with good reason. I am not simply
referring to the institutionalization of postcolonial theory in the Anglo-Amer-
ican academia in the 1980s primarily through these two departments; rather
I am much more concerned here about the way postcolonial theory engaged
with the constitutive principles of such disciplines. The complicity between
these two disciplines, on the one hand, and the course of nation formation
in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe, on the other, is a well-known
story. Implicit in this co-production was the principle of their mutual cor-
roboration—the textual and the territorial did not simply coincide but they
were meant to stand in for each other. The result is that literatures and his-
tories since the nineteenth century have most prominently been closed off
by national boundaries and territorial protocols. Postcolonial theory made
two important inroads in this edifice and challenged the economy of this
construction—fi rst, Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978) and the works of the
Subaltern Studies historians in the 1980s exposed a further layer of collu-
sion between such developments in Europe and its imperial expansion, espe-
cially the way the power–knowledge nexus as well as the material forces of
this European venture shaped the lifeworlds and livelihoods in the overseas
colonies. A third voice was soon added to this ensemble in the 1980s—that
of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak—who renovated the project of the Subaltern
historiography (Chatterjee) and also transformed the ways scholars engaged
with the questions of coloniality/postcoloniality. And second, postcolonial
theory, which was largely inspired by these early interventions, also turned
its gaze to the colonial and postcolonial locations to reinterpret them within a
counter-narrative to European modes of knowledge production. In the 1980s
and 1990s these revisionist readings considerably reconfigured the various
disciplines of knowledge and gave rise to an ethico-political field known as
postcolonial studies or simply as postcolonial theory. The result of this dual
intervention has been quite dramatic at a global scale; as Susie O’Brien and
Imre Szeman summarize it,
Though there is no shortage of criticism of postcolonial studies—even
or especially from within its own ranks—no other critical practice has
foregrounded the links between cultural forms and geopolitics to the
degree that postcolonial studies has over the past four decades. No other
materialist practice has considered the modalities of race, nation, gen-
der, and ethnicity, in relationship to the global activity of hegemonic
cultural, political, and economic forces, with the degrees of complexity
and sophistication that have come to be associated with the best work in
the field. Before postcolonial studies, Western scholarship was an embar-
rassment. (606)
History and literature played vital roles in such postcolonial and revi-
sionist projects, and Gramsci’s insights featured prominently. Let me begin
with Said’s elaboration on Gramsci in Orientalism, and how this can be used
as a thread through his critical oeuvre, most notably in his formulation of
“secular criticism” in the introduction to The World, the Text, and the Critic.3
It is important to note that Said invokes Gramsci at two crucial junctures in
Orientalism—fi rst to explain the stability of Orientalism (where he also names
Michel Foucault and Raymond Williams as possible theoretical allies) and
second to point out his own personal stakes in the project. Said’s debt in
the fi rst case is quite specific, as he invokes the familiar Gramscian concept
of “hegemony” to account for the “durability and strength” of Orientalism.
He also acknowledges that hegemony is “an indispensable concept for any
understanding of cultural life in the industrial West” (Said, Orientalism 7).
Alongside this quite impersonal working of cultural hegemony Said proposes
his own investment in the project through Gramsci by echoing the latter’s
point that the “starting-point of critical elaboration is the consciousness of
what one really is, and is ‘knowing thyself’ as a product of the historical pro-
cess to date, which has deposited in you an infi nity of traces, without leaving
an inventory”; the critical project for him is, as also was with Gramsci, “to
compile such an inventory.” Orientalism, Said suggests, is such an inventory
of his own history as a displaced “Oriental” subject:
Much of the personal investment in this study derives from my aware-

ness of being an “Oriental” as a child growing up in two British colonies
. . . In many ways my study of Orientalism has been an attempt to in-
ventory the traces upon me, the Oriental subject, of the culture whose
domination has been so powerful a factor in the life of all Orientals.
(Said, Orientalism 25)
His insistence on the “cultural reality of [and] the personal involvement in

having been constituted as ‘an Oriental,’” the “disheartening” life of an Arab
Palestinian in the West and his resultant invisibility in the social field (Said,
Orientalism 26–27), all lead to the notion of cultural domination that sustained
Orientalism for the better part of its history and that remains a defi ning force
for the displaced critic even in the late twentieth century. To get the full mea-
sure of Said’s formulation of cultural domination, and the way he calls upon
Gramsci, let me introduce here his defi nition of culture from the introduction
to The World, the Text, and the Critic; he claims that culture entails “an environ-
ment, process, and hegemony in which individuals (in their private circum-
stances) and their works are embedded, as well as overseen at the top by a
superstructure and at the base by a whole series of methodological attitudes.”
To drive his point home he further suggests that “[i]t is in culture that we can
seek out the range of meanings and ideas conveyed by the phrases belonging
to or in a place, being at home in a place” (8; emphasis original). Hegemony,

then, is no longer an effect of cultural domination but a dimension built into
cultural practices and forms; one’s relationship to cultural forms is also nego-
tiated through the hegemonic forces that defi ne a given culture, and that
further dictates the modes of belonging or otherwise.
Said’s theory of “secular criticism” needs to be understood against this
formulation of culture.4 Bruce Robbins has suggested that “secular” in Said’s
critical vocabulary is not the antinomy to institutional religion but is an
“opposing term . . . to nationalism” (26). Aamir Mufti, while retaining this
lead, has also argued that one needs to be careful about such displacement
of terminologies; his own view is that Said’s formulation of the “secular” has
vital implications for postcolonial secularism since it is rooted in the “con-
cern with minority culture and existence” so much so that that the condition
of minority functions as “a fundamental and constitutive concern, a condi-
tion of possibility of the critical practice itself” (96). 5 While both these read-
ings are important for my argument, and I will return to them later, here I
want to pursue a somewhat different lead provided by Said’s texts, and argue
that both these interpretations restrict the project of secular criticism within
a frame focused solely on the nation. Whether seen as rebuttal of national-
ism as belief system or as elaboration on the minority within a (postcolonial)
nation-state, the secular in Said’s imagination loses its edge through its exclu-
sive association with the nation. My suggestion is that rather than prioritiz-
ing the territorial codes of the nation, it would be much more productive
if we conceptualize the operative principle in his argument as a series that
comprises of concepts like place, displacement and criticism and their complex
interplay in constituting modern conditions of belonging. Indeed Said makes
it abundantly clear that the intimate connection between the idea of place
and the protocols of a given culture must not be framed vis-à-vis the nation.
Though the “readiest account of place might defi ne it as the nation,” and “in
the exaggerated boundary drawn between Europe and the Orient . . . the
idea of the nation, a national-cultural community as a sovereign entity and
place set against other places, has its fullest realization” (Said, The World, the
Text, and the Critic 8), he suggests, their assumed identity is counterproduc-
tive. Neither the everyday conception of place nor this ready qualification of
place-as-nation can capture the full semantic content of phrases like “at home
in place;” on the contrary, if one foregrounds the primacy of the nation in
understanding the workings of modern culture, one runs the risk of reproduc-
ing the “exaggerated boundaries” that marked the imperial political order.
However, Said should not be taken as suggesting an unproblematic asso-
ciation between cultural belonging and place; I think his primary point is
that culture—as highly determined “environment, process, and hegemony”—
delimits the circulation of time, space and representation and thus regu-
lates a complex system of inclusion and exclusion within a given structure
loosely defi ned as place. This hegemonic process is responsible for the way
cultural value is produced and distributed across the social field (leading to
cultural hierarchies), and also for the way individuals are placed within the
social field made of hierarchical structures. Said clearly wants to release this
description from the codes mandated by nation-states and further attempts
to articulate it at a global level for two reasons. First, secular criticism is
aimed at specific forms of cultural domination like Orientalism that stretches
across nations, and its critique, likewise, has to be rooted in non-national
spaces. In his introduction to Orientalism, he clearly signposts this:
For the general reader, this study deals with matters that always com-
pel attention, all of them connected not only with Western conceptions
and treatments of the Other but also with the singularly important role
played by Western culture in what Vico called the world of nations.
Lastly, for readers in the so-called Third World, this study proposes itself
as a step towards an understanding not so much of Western politics and
of the non-Western world in those politics as, of the strength of Western
cultural discourse, a strength too often mistaken as merely decorative
or “superstructural.” My hope is to illustrate the formidable structure of
cultural domination and, specifically for formerly colonized peoples, the
dangers and temptations of employing this structure upon themselves or
upon others. (Said 24–25)
The “dangers and temptations” of Orientalism is the cultural domina-

tion of the “world of nations,” or a world that reveres national identity and
distributes it through the grids of imperial structures; Orientalism, in other
words, may function in the “world of nations” but its cultural formations
are not necessarily reducible to the nation. The danger for the postcolonial
world—itself a supra-national territory—is precisely that it may, along with the
derivative nationalist ideals, repeat this imperial formation. Mufti’s sugges-
tion that this danger is palpable in the majority–minority relationship in post-
colonial nations is a partial reading of Said (Mufti, “Auerbach in Istanbul”
109–10). The thrust of the argument clearly shows that cultural domination
is not necessarily restricted within national structures and institutions and
secularism in this instance must be supra-national and opposed to global
cultural formations. The globality of such formations is not accidental, but
guaranteed by modern imperialism.
The influence of Gramsci on Said is once more palpable in the second
case where he again tries to avoid the national frame. Toward the end of
his introduction to The World, the Text, and the Critic he approvingly quotes
Raymond Williams’ commentary with prominent Gramscian overtones that
no dominant social formation can exhaust all “social experience” and thus
there are always possible “space for alternative acts and alternative inten-
tions which are not yet articulated as a social institution or even project”;
once we agree with this, Said argues, then “criticism belongs in that poten-
tial space inside civil society, acting on behalf of those alternative acts and
alternative intentions whose advancement is a fundamental human and intel-
lectual obligations” (Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic 29 –30).6 If in
the earlier case he advocates a move beyond the nation-state, here he revis-
its the Gramscian distinction between civil and political societies to situate
both dominant cultural formations and its critical opposition in the former.7
This duality of criticism, that it is pitted against cultural formations that are
simultaneously larger and smaller than any given national culture, produces
its radical appeal—the radicalism lies in its “suspicion of totalizing concepts
. . . its discontent with reified objects . . . its impatience with guilds, special
interests, imperialized fiefdoms, and orthodox habits of mind” (Said, The
World, the Text, and the Critic 29). In short, criticism is most effective when it
is in displacement, when it is in opposition to various territorial categories
and thus rendered nomadic.
The exteriority of criticism indeed is the global dimension of postcolonial
theory. The fi nal gloss Said provides on secular criticism, about criticism
vis-à-vis what he calls “fi lial” and “affi liative” relationships, makes the point
clear.8 Cultural domination, he suggests, becomes effective with the pas-
sage from the fi rst to the second, with the naturalization of affi liative bonds.
Though the affi liative is initially conceived as an alternative to the fi lial—and
this is a point Said charts through some of the stalwarts of modernism—the
relationship, under rigorous inspection, turns out to be collusive and hege-
monic. The role of the critic is not to endorse the passage between two forms
of cultural association but to expose the way affi liative cultural forms become
legitimized by reproducing the frame of the fi lial. The critic, in other words,
is not simply a product of history, but is also a “historical and social actor”;
her position is prompted not by “conformity and belonging” but by “circum-
stance and distinction” that produces distance and the possibility of criticism
(Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic 15–24). The critic is equally situated
at the cusp of the two—between the “culture to which critics are bound fi li-
atively” and “a method or system acquired affi liatively” (Said, The World,
the Text, and the Critic 25). The displacement of criticism is a measure of the
oppositional relationship that the critic can maintain with the universalist
and naturalized claims of both fi lial and affi liative codes of a given culture.
The point is not a naive return to possibilities opened up by Enlightenment
or the liberal ideals of critique, but an endeavor to expose the mechanism
of cultural and systematic claims that are increasingly global. The nomadic
secularism of Said is indeed a contrapuntal point to the increasing homog-
enization of global cultural productions.
Humanism as Praxis
Said’s formulation of secular criticism as a non-national and indeed global
phenomenon, however, must not be taken as blind endorsement of elite cos-
mopolitanism. In important ways it revisits and modifies some of the key

concepts in Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks in an effort to redeploy them for the
postcolonial condition. The secularism he advocates is postcolonial because it
is rooted in the history of displacement occasioned by quasi-religious authori-
ties of imperialism; it is also part of a history Gramsci describes as the emer-
gence of a modern secular “humanism.” Gramsci’s own elaboration on the
possibilities of such a position is rooted in his careful reading of Italian his-
tory, and hence all the more apposite for my purpose because of the similari-
ties between Italy and much of the colonial/postcolonial world; his starting
point is the split between the national and the popular in the Italian context:
One should note that in many languages, “national” and “popular” are
either synonymous or nearly so (they are in Russian, in German, where
völkisch has an even more intimate meaning of race, and in the Slavonic
languages in general; in France the meaning of “national” already in-
cludes a more politically elaborated notion of “popular” because it is re-
lated to the concept of “sovereignty”: national sovereignty and popular
sovereignty have, or had, the same value). In Italy the term “national”
has an ideologically very restricted meaning, and does not in any case
coincide with “popular” because in Italy the intellectuals are distant from
the people, i.e. from the “nation.” They are tied instead to a caste tradition
that has never been broken by a strong popular or national political move-
ment from below. (Gramsci, Selections from Cultural Writings 208)
Gramsci makes it clear that this relationship is not a natural one but the prod-
uct of history—that is, in both cases where there is a perfect match between
the two (as in France) and where there isn’t any (as in Italy), the phenom-
enon should be seen as the result of concrete historical events. In Italy the
national was segregated and restricted, as its intelligentsia historically could
not develop a national-popular consciousness/collective will since the Renais-
sance (SPNB 113, 131), and eventually failed even to unite the popular with
the state. 9
In “Notes on Italian History” he observes that the chief failure of the
Italian national movement in the nineteenth century was its inability to
transform itself into a popular one. Whereas France in the nineteenth cen-
tury could forge a genuine national-popular through both bourgeois revolu-
tion and cultural alliance, the national movement in Italy failed to extend
its sphere of influence beyond a select few (SPNB 52–54). The promises of
Risorgimento quickly faded into passivity (a “revolution without revolution”
or “passive revolution”) because of the central failure to bring the people in
its fold, and because of its inability to conceive of the national as coterminous
with the popular. Gramsci identifies two reasons for this historic failure: fi rst,
he points out that the “Italian bourgeoisie was incapable of uniting the peo-
ple around itself, and this was the cause of its defeats and the interruptions
in its development” (SPNB 53). This was most notable in the Action Party’s
failure to effect a dialectical mobilization through rural classes, on the one
hand, and through the intellectuals from the “middle and lower strata,” on
the other (SPNB 54). In his opinion, such a dialectical move would have
been critical as a safeguard against the growing influence of the Moderates,
and also as a way of forging a national alliance across Italy. Along with this,
the Action Party also lacked a certain Jacobinism which Gramsci describes
as the “inflexible will to become the “leading” [dirigente] party” (SPNB 80);
in the absence of such a will to lead, the Action Party not only failed to give
birth to a Jacobin spirit (described as “audacious, dauntless” that would have
resulted in something like the French revolution, but also lost control over the
vast majority of the rural classes especially in the impoverished South (SPNB
84). The problem manifests itself at different moments in modern Italian
history: in the “immaturity and intrinsic weakness” of the educated class in
their historic failure to lead the “popular masses and develop their progres-
sive elements” (SPNB 90); in the aftermath of the Risorgimento, especially
through the rightists who “made the people-nation into an instrument, into
an object” and thus “degraded it” (SPNB 90); in the complex and unequal
relationship between the “countryside” and the “city” which not only rein-
forced the North–South divide in various combinations but even nullified
the vitally important “agrarian question” under the virtual domination of the
industrial North (SPNB 100–2).
For my purpose here the important point is Gramsci’s tracking of this com-
plex history through cultural artifacts, most notably narrative fiction. His
point of reference is a perplexing question, that despite the huge demand for
popular literature “why does the Italian public read foreign literature, popu-
lar and non-popular, instead of reading its own?” (Gramsci, Selections from
Cultural Writings 209). Newspapers catered to popular taste by regularly
serializing foreign and mostly French popular novels, the people seemed
to enjoy old novels like Count of Monte-Cristo instead of any modern Italian
novel, and the public literary discussions were imbued with foreign values
and norms. The result was that the Italian people became interested in a
“past that is more French than Italian”: “[T]hey know the popular figure of
Henry IV better than that of Garibaldi, the Revolution of 1789 better than
the Risorgimento and the invectives of Victor Hugo against Napoleon III
better than the invectives of Italian patriots against Metternich” (Gramsci,
Selections from Cultural Writings 216). To put it another way, barring a few
minor exceptions, Italian authors failed to connect with the lived worlds of
the people, to fictionalize their intellectual and emotional aspirations. It is
this gap between the national intelligentsia—whom Gramsci describes as
“something detached, without foundation, a caste and not an articulation
with organic functions of the people themselves” (Gramsci, Selections from
Cultural Writings 209)—and the people that was responsible for the absence
of popular literature of a national kind, something that would have been
able to unite popular sentiments with artistic ingenuity. This failure, as we

have seen already, is historic in nature for Gramsci and certainly not an iso-
lated event; what is interesting to note here is that he gives it a further twist
by describing the failure as the intelligentsia’s inability to develop a modern
and secular “humanism”:
The lay forces have failed in their historical task as educators and elab-
orators of the intellect and the moral awareness of the people-nation.
They have been incapable of satisfying the intellectual needs of the peo-
ple precisely because they have failed to represent a lay culture, because
they have not known how to elaborate a modern “humanism” able to reach
right to the simplest and most uneducated classes, as was necessary from
the national point of view, and because they have been tied to an anti-
quated world, narrow, abstract, too individualistic or caste-like. French
popular literature, on the other hand, which is the most widespread in
Italy, does represent this modern humanism, this in its own way modern
secularism, to a greater or lesser degree, and in a more or less attractive
way. (Gramsci, Selections from Cultural Writings 211; emphasis added)10
There are two vital points in this quote that I wish to highlight at this
point. First, Gramsci’s formulation that “modern ‘humanism’” must be secu-
lar in nature is made within a specific historical context, and thus it invites
us to think about the meaning of history in the creation of such a spirit. He
of course makes the point that if the lay intellectuals failed to connect with
the masses the Catholics had hardly fared better. But the secular humanism
he proposes has larger historical milieu, and a more complex trajectory, than
this simple comparison with the church. I shall discuss some of the major
features of this history further and shall also suggest that this remains the
closest approximation to Said’s secular criticism. The second point I want
to underscore is the connection that Gramsci makes between this secular
humanism and popular culture. The gap between the intellectuals and the
masses is not caused by the absence of popular literature; neither is the secu-
lar humanism missing from popular culture altogether. The point rather is
that the “intellectual needs” of the people are being satisfied by non-national
cultural artifacts like French novels that had served their purpose in their
own nations and now were playing a surrogate role in Italy.11 The real failure
of the Italian intelligentsia was their inability to dress the secular humanism
within a national garb, to unite the national-popular collective will with the
state; popular culture (or its absence) was the measure of that failure. Mod-
ern and secular humanism, then, is part of popular cultural formations and
is not necessarily restricted by national boundaries.
Gramsci’s rejection of the transcendent metaphysics of German philoso-
phy in favor of historicism or humanism is a topic of much debate. It is
worth noting, however, that in his discussion of Marxism Gramsci describes
the “philosophy of praxis” as “absolute historicism or absolute humanism”;

historicism is derived from “Hegelian immanentism,” but it becomes abso-
lute only when combined with the philosophy of praxis, and the product of
this fusion is humanism (SPNB 417). As Gramsci makes it clear here and
elsewhere in Prison Notebooks, humanism for him primarily means an under-
standing of history (and hence the equivalence with historicism), that his-
tory is the product of human labor and not a divinely ordained sequence of
events. Even human consciousness is part of this historical narrative and not
anterior to it. But when he qualifies it as secular, he has very specific histori-
cal sequencing in mind. Secular humanism becomes important when there is
a need to create a “new intellectual and moral order” or a “new type of soci-
ety,” typically in a post-revolution society when the subaltern class becomes
both autonomous and hegemonic. The task indeed is threefold: to “develop
more universal concepts and more refi ned and decisive ideological weap-
ons,” to “open the struggle for an autonomous and superior culture,” and to
give a “modern and contemporary form to the traditional secular humanism
which must be the ethical basis of the new type of State” (SPNB 388).12 The
tripartite task is also the mechanism through which the intellectual (the critic
in Said’s account) can surpass her separation from the masses.
Within the specific context of Italian history Gramsci locates the origins
of humanism in the history of the Renaissance. In a characteristic way, he
distinguishes between two meanings of Renaissance—“the Renaissance is a
very significant movement which begins after 1000, of which Humanism and
the Renaissance (in the strict sense) are two conclusive moments, which have
Italy as their principal seat, while the more general historical process is Euro-
pean and not just Italian” (Gramsci, Selections from Cultural Writings 221). The
Renaissance then is both a periodization and, along with humanism, a prod-
uct of that period. Indeed, Gramsci imagines a more intimate connection
between humanism and the Renaissance since the origin of the former can
be found in the latter—in other words, the basic unit of humanism, that is,
man “was not ‘discovered’, rather a new form of culture was initiated [during
the Renaissance], a new effort to create a new type of man in the dominant
classes” (Gramsci, Selections from Cultural Writings 217). This new form of
culture had very different trajectories in Italy and the rest of Europe—while
in other countries the combined forces of humanism and the Renaissance led
to the formation of national states, in Italy, in spite of its vital contribution
through communes that decisively challenged the feudal order, the general
movement degenerated. Instead of national states, Italy was overtaken by
“papacy as an absolute state” that destroyed the spirit of the Renaissance and
“broke up the rest of Italy” (Gramsci, Selections from Cultural Writings 222).
Gramsci reads Machiavelli as proposing the theory that without a national
state the Renaissance remains incomplete and offers Italian history as empir-
ical corroboration. There are two interesting outcomes of this rather sche-
matic reading of history: Gramsci acknowledges that though the culmination
of the Renaissance was the national state, in large parts of Europe—Spain,

France, England and Portugal—the history continued through their impe-
rial expansion. In contrast, because of the imperfect nature of the Italian
state, the Renaissance was able to give birth to two kinds of intellectuals,
one that colluded with the papacy and was “reactionary in nature,” and the
other which “was formed abroad by political and religious exiles and had a
progressive function in the various countries in which it took up residence”
(Gramsci, Selections from Cultural Writings 220).
A number of key concerns in Gramsci’s thinking are at play here: the
failure of the Italian state, the ascendency of papacy that stifled the national-
popular, the regressive nature of the traditional intellectual, and so on. The
failure of humanism in Italy is instructive because it offers a new theoretical
framework to conceptualize these concerns—it offers a non-national fram-
ing within which these concerns can be articulated. The secular humanism
he champions—“human spirit as the creator of life and history” (Gramsci,
Selections from Cultural Writings 234)—is not a philosophical position that
can be formulated or worked out within a national framework; even though
he recognizes the contribution of this philosophy in the making of modern
European nation-states, the result of such national containment only leads
to imperial expansion. It seems to me much more interesting to follow
the lead that the philosophical position is the key to understanding the
popular, the way it shapes up within a given social structure, and the way it
negotiates with hegemonic structures. Secular humanism, in other words,
is a critical tool that allows one to think of the popular without necessarily
subsuming it to the fi nal framing of the national or without making it an
abstract category that remains locked in the pedagogical realm of national
culture. In the context of Italy the failure of the intelligentsia to nationalize
this secular philosophy—a fact that Gramsci laments—paradoxically opens
up the space for this new theorization in his own work. Gramsci’s work, in
other words, sets a global paradigm for critical thinking beyond the nation
or national culture. The analogy between Said’s secular criticism and
Gramsci’s secular humanism practically suggests itself not only because of
the former’s expressed debt to the latter, but more so because of the way
both try to develop a theoretical paradigm that would be responsive to the
cultural hegemonies with supra-national structures, and a philosophical
underpinning for radical thinking.
The Terrain Ahead

As would be evident by now, I chart two accounts of criticism through Gram-
sci and Said in order to make fresh inroads into the globalization–postcoloni-
ality debate, and I want to suggest that whether one looks at the foundational
moments of postcolonial theory or the genealogies of such thinking, there
are interesting and provocative leads that can take us beyond the national
question. The common thread that runs through these two accounts of Said
and Gramsci is of course their emphasis on the possibility of non-national
critical thinking; but it should not be taken as a purely negative position, that
is, it should not be taken only as negation of the nation-state. In both cases
the philosophical position reformulates criticism itself as a social and secular
vocation. In Culture and Imperialism Said revisits Gramsci to make this point.
He reiterates the fundamental point I have mapped in Gramsci, that in spite
of an “irreducible subjective core to human experience” such experiences
are also “historical and secular”; the relationship between human experience
and history is that of mutual influence and not of exclusion. The historical
and secular aspect of this interaction cannot be “marked and limited by
doctrinal or national lines” and cannot be permanently restricted within
“analytical constructs.” Indeed the legacy of Gramsci is precisely to expose
the absurdity of such attempts to essentialize human experience and his-
tory according to doctrinal or quasi-religious authorities, or narrowly defi ned
dogmas or credos. If one believes with Gramsci, Said argues, that an “intel-
lectual vocation is socially possible as well as desirable,” then it is important
to recognize at the same time that such a vocation cannot be constructed on
“historical experience around exclusions” of any kind. Every doctrinal or
national claim, or every form of essentialization functions on exclusions—so-
cial, political, cultural, and so on—and the task of the secular critic is to think
beyond such strategies of exclusion, to make possible a form of thinking that
does not correspond to such strategies (Said, Culture and Imperialism 35).
Let me illustrate my point with an example from Culture and Imperialism.
The central point about modern imperialism according to Said is a very Grams-
cian one: “[H]ow the national British, French, American cultures maintained
hegemony over the peripheries. How within them was consent gained and con-
tinuously consolidated for the distant rule of native peoples and territories?”
To understand this imperial conundrum, he suggests, there are two critical
strategies—either one can read European cultural forms against their supposed
autonomy, and place them against the larger history of European imperialism
where they will show traces of their global genealogy. And second, a related
theme that Said describes as a “contrapuntal” reading strategy with a “simul-
taneous awareness both of the metropolitan history that is narrated and of
those other histories against which (and together with which) the dominating
discourse acts” (Said, Culture and Imperialism 59). Both these strategies are of
course examples of secular criticism; the central aim in both cases is a secular
unraveling of power and its ability to generate consent across territories. But
the secularism of these practices, especially the way I have elaborated it above,
needs some further clarification. In Culture and Imperialism in general, and espe-
cially here, Said’s argument takes a notably spatial turn as he translates impe-
rial culture into a “cultural topography” that spans across the imperial divide,
across metropolitan and peripheral territories, and allows the secular practice
of contrapuntal reading.13 Modern empires are marked by territorial expansion
and control; modern imperial cultures are similarly territorial in their orienta-
tion. Though cultural productions are not always marked by any singular ter-
ritorial ideology of the empire, and though modern empires lack any such one
official ideology in the first place, cultural texts are often marked by this central
principle of representing cultural topography.
Said’s preferred example is a series of canonical English authors like
Spenser, Shakespeare, Defoe and Austen who consistently represent far-flung
territories that are connected with the British empire in various ways; the
consistency does not stop at mere representation, it is extends in the mode
of such representation of such distant lands as “desirable but subordinate.”
The point is not that all these writers were convinced about the greatness of
British empire, or that they participated in nefarious conspiracy to embolden
the overwhelming imperial project, but rather that their texts are “bound up
with the development of Britain’s cultural identity, as that identity imagines
itself in a geographically conceived world” (Said, Culture and Imperialism 61).
This is by no means is unique to British imagination either, as innumerable
similar examples from French and American cultures testify. What is unique
in this mode of representation across modern imperial cultures is the “way
in which structures of location and geographical reference appear in the
cultural languages of literature, history, or ethnography” that are not always
orchestrated as part of larger imperial designs (Said, Culture and Imperialism
61). Contrapuntal reading strategies can unearth the vast imperial archive
across genres to show how the hegemonic metropolitan cultures are actually
shaped by such cultural topographies.
The point I wish to highlight about the description of cultural topography
is its inspiration. In the pages immediately preceding this vital formulation of
contrapuntal reading Said tells us that Gramsci provides an “explicitly geo-
graphical model” to think about imperial culture; he is particularly suitable
for this since, unlike Lukacs, his focus is resolutely on the “territorial, spatial,
geographical foundations of social life” and that his oeuvre testifies to his inter-
est in conceptualizing “social history and actuality” in overtly “geographical
terms” (Said, Culture and Imperialism 57).14 The piece Said chooses to discuss
is “Some Aspects of the Southern Question” where Gramsci considers the vast
discrepancies between the industrial North and the agrarian South, and how in
spite of its degeneration the South holds a key to understanding the problems
of the North. The text is situated between Gramsci’s journalistic writing and
Prison Notebooks, and as such can be seen as prelude to his extended reflection
on the failure of the Italian national project in the latter. I have already indi-
cated some of these concerns in the section on Gramsci; but what Said wishes
to highlight is the territorial underpinning of Gramsci’s argument. He points
out Gramsci’s remarkable detailing of the peculiar topography of the South,
and his fastidious attempt to relate this topography to the larger question of
national integration. Though Said does not say this explicitly, he almost wants
to recast Italian history after the model of imperial territorial domination,
where the advanced Northern metropolitan centre controls the vast Southern
countryside teeming with poor peasants and cheap laborers, and at the same
time in important ways depends on it. Said’s reading of Gramsci’s text presents
it not only as an instance of secular criticism but as an exercise in contrapuntal
reading itself, displaying in this process how questions of culture and imperial-
ism necessarily cross borders.
The next move in Said’s reading is also closely related to our concern here—
that is, the role of the critic and the functioning of secular criticism. He brings out
the importance Gramsci accords to Piero Gobetti and his work in connecting
the North and the South and in working out an exceptional model for this pur-
pose. Gobetti recognized the need to connect the two parts of Italy but did not
conceive such a connection through cultural homogenization or forced national
assimilation. Rather, Gramsci argues, his proposal was two-pronged—on the
one hand, he introduced the Northern proletariat to the Southern peasantry,
and on the other, he emphasized the importance of cultural organization in
bringing about such an alliance. In this radical rethinking of history Gobetti
was indeed a break in the Italian intellectual tradition—a decisive contrast to say
Croce or Fortunato—and a secular intellectual who understood the importance
of intellectual labor in its secular and worldly dispensation. Said, however, also
points out that Gramsci is particularly sensitive to the temporal structure of
such intellectual labor; he, along with Gobetti, recognizes the importance of the
break the latter provides and the cultural projects that need to be built on such
a crucial break, but also admits that, in Said’s words,
intellectual work is slower, works according to more extended calendars

than that of any other social group. Culture cannot be looked at as an
immediate fact but has to be seen (as he was to say in the Quaderni)
sub specie aeternitatis. Much time elapses before new cultural formations
emerge, and intellectuals, who depend on long years of perception, ac-
tion, and tradition, are necessary to this process. (Said, Culture and Im-
perialism 57–58)
The longue durée of cultural practices are part of the secular vision I have
been charting through Said and Gramsci, and the very structure makes it
imperative that secular intellectual labor be part of it in at least two ways—in
the fi rst instance, in terms of political commitment, and in the second by
being itself the “link between disparate, apparently autonomous regions of
human history” (Said, Culture and Imperialism 58).
At this stage we may return to the debates with which I open this chapter—
the crisis of postcolonial theory and the rhetoric of globalization. The debate
has been concerned for too long with the question of the nation-state—that is,
whether postcolonial theory in its global ambition valorizes national culture
(since the outcome of decolonization was the nation-state) or whether it already
marks the advent of a global culture based on hybridity and difference. A clas-
sic case in point is Simon Gikandi’s essay “Globalization and the Claims of
Postcoloniality.” Published in a special issue on postcolonial literature and glo-
balization, it starts with quite a few bold claims about the problematic at hand;
one of the most interesting arguments he puts forward is that there is a natural
link between the vocabularies of contemporary globalization and postcolonial
theory, making the latter particularly adept at discussing issues of global cultural
production. He makes a distinction between the earlier phase of globalization
that was dominated by the rhetoric of colonization and modernization and the
latter one that is built around postcolonial terms like hybridity and difference.
The result, Gikandi argues, is that a new grammar of globalization is at hand
that heavily borrows from critical terms made available by postcolonial theory.
After this elaboration, however, Gikandi surprisingly goes back to the history
of nationalism and its role in the making of postcolonial cultures; the claims of
the nation, he suggests, are still strong and it would be foolish to discard the
history of the nation in the production of modern cultural forms. This more
or less summarizes the central thrust in most accounts of the debate—the par-
ticipants have only relativized the question (how important is the nation after
all) or have sounded cautionary notes against various theoretical assumptions.
One of the central challenges for critical thinking I think is to move beyond
such exhausted paradigms of the debate, and to produce an organic break in
the intellectual tradition that both Gramsci and Said see as vital for intellectual
labor. The lead provided by both is a stepping-stone toward such a goal; the rest
remains to be worked out.
Notes
1. I would like to thank Neelam Srivastava and Rajeswari Sunder Rajan for their
comments on an earlier draft of this essay.
2. The reference is to Marx’s 1844 text “Towards a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of
Right: Introduction”; the passage runs like this: “The weapon of criticism obviously
cannot replace the criticism of weapons. Material force must be overthrown by
material force. But theory also becomes a material force once it has gripped the
masses. Theory is capable of gripping the masses when it demonstrates ad hom-
inem, and it demonstrates ad hominem when it becomes radical” (34).
3. Much of what Said says about “secular criticism” in his introduction to The
World, the Text, and the Critic, especially about its “oppositional” nature, Jona-
than Arac reminds us, can be traced back to his early works like Beginnings (56);
this is partly why I treat it as a theme running through his oeuvre.
4. “Secular criticism” is often a misunderstood concept in Said’s oeuvre and hence
needs careful elaboration (See Mufti 1998). Even an otherwise sympathetic com-
mentator like Abdirahman A. Hussein, for example, completely misconstrues
Said’s concept by describing it as one of the “age-old imperatives” that Said merely
wishes to re-introduce with a contemporary critical edge (Hussein 11–12).
5. This preoccupation with the question of minority also allows Mufti to develop
the notion of what he calls “critical secularism” or “a secularist critique of mod-
ern secularism” (Mufti, Enlightenment in the Colony 13–14).

6. The reference here is to Williams, Politics and Letters 252; he elaborates this at
greater length in Marxism and Literature 125.
7. In Orientalism he argues, “Culture, of course, is to be found operating within
civil society, where the influence of ideas, of institutions, and of other persons
works not through domination but by what Gramsci calls consent. In any soci-
ety not totalitarian, then, certain cultural forms predominate over others, just as
certain ideas are more influential than others; the form of this cultural leader-
ship is what Gramsci has identified as hegemony” (Said 7).
8. In Said’s formulation fi lial bonds are based on “natural forms of authority” that
involves “obedience, fear, love, respect and instinctual confl ict,” and the affi lia-
tive relationships are predicated on “transpersonal forms” like “guild conscious-
ness, consensus, collegiality, professional respect, class, and the hegemony of a
dominant culture” (Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic 20).
9. As Gramsci argues elsewhere, “It must be observed that in Italy, unlike other coun-
tries, not even religion acted as an element of cohesion between people and intel-
lectuals, and that for this very reason the philosophical crisis of the intellectuals did
not extend to the people, because it did not originate from the people and there did
not exist a ‘national-popular bloc’ in the religious field” (quoted in SPNB 394).
10. Gramsci of course acknowledges that a few Italian authors like Guerrazzi and
Mastriani represented the spirit of this modern humanism but by and large it
remained a peripheral force in modern Italian culture.
11. Gramsci notes, “Now the absence of a national-popular literature . . . has left
the literary ‘market’ open to the influence of intellectuals from other countries.
‘National-popular’ writers at home, they become national-popular in Italy too
because the needs which they satisfy are the same in this country” (Gramsci,
Selections from Cultural Writings 215).
12. Secular here, however, must not be confused with atheism, since in Gramsci’s
formulation the latter is a “purely negative and sterile form, unless it is to be
conceived as a period of pure popular literary polemic” (SPNB 418).
13. For a different reading of this spatial turn in Said’s work, and its connection with
Gramscian humanism, see Brennan, “Places of Mind.”
14. Elsewhere Said talks about a “spatial tradition” of thinkers, which is based on
Italian materialism and can be traced back to Lucretius; this tradition includes,
among others, Gramsci (Mitchell 43).
Part II
Global Present
Gramsci and the
5 The “Unseen Order”
Religion, Secularism and Hegemony
Iain Chambers
El Jadida. It is the hour that milk is delivered. The hour that I love the
most in my city, peopled still only for an instance by those who have
to rise early: street cleaners, fi sherman, donut vendors, the devout,
vegetable sellers, the custodians of the public ovens. One after another
they wish me a “luminous day” while I wander the streets and alleys.
Come with me into the old Portuguese town where the past has been
restored in the smallest detail. In this space, the size of a public square,
there, flanking each other, is a mosque, a church and a synagogue.
What is this Islamism? This word does not appear in our dictionaries.
I learnt of its existence in the Western media.
—Driss Chraibi, “Extreme West”1
[A]ll of history is testimony to the present.

—Antonio Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere2
Christianity invented the distinction between religious and secular, and

thus it made religion. It made religion the problem—rather than itself.
—Gil Anidjar, Semites. Race, Religion, Literature3
Power seeks a language of authorization. Such a language is neither

invented ex novo nor simply borrowed. It is assembled, elaborated and
practiced wherever possible and via whatever means. The making of such
a language, that is the articulation of power to name, hence direct and
defi ne, necessarily draws upon available sense. In order to convince and
convey, even when there is the desire to promote a radical announcement,
language cannot stray too far from an already established semantics. It
can only shift, extend and push the existing langue; that is why language is
essentially about hegemony. The struggle for sense—both for meaning and
direction—requires language. And if language is not invented but rather
constructed and configured, then existing senses—social, cultural, politi-
cal, historical, religious, and so on—coalesce and combine in its making.
102 Iain Chambers
Or rather, they take form and fl ight there, in the very stuff and texture
of the parole. It is also here, in its performative exercise and consensual
recognition, that power is transformed from mere force to a disseminating
pedagogy and the potential counter-site of possible replies.
Among the lexicons that have seemingly returned to invest the powers
of modernity is that of religion. Once assumed to have been superseded by
modern, secular society, we discover that religion has become the name of
a struggle for authority within modernity: both in London and Cairo; both
in cultural configurations correlated by Christianity as in those of Islam,
Judaism and Hinduism. Religion, as a modality of modern power, directly
and indirectly seeks to provide the narrative authority able to domesticate

the world and command the horizon of contemporary sense.4 This suggests
that in religion today we encounter far more than the institutional force of
consecrated texts and their custody in religious authorities, even more than
the creation of communities of believers and the attraction of the sacred.
There emerges here, as Foucault might have suggested, a discursive power
that penetrates the textures of our lives and regulates the bio-politics of our
very being and becoming.
The “natural sacredness” of reality which sustains the poetical piety
pursued in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s fi lm, The Gospel according to Saint Matthew
(1964), as in all of his cinema, promotes a humble mission to endow the
world with social justice: an act of faith that is simultaneously a critique of
religious authority and the institutional powers of the Catholic Church for
their subsequent betrayal of Christ. 5 A similar perspective was pursued in
those very same years by the Italian anthropologist Ernesto De Martino in
his ethnographic work among the peasantry of Southern Italy. There is a
subversive idea here. Language, as it were, is turned against itself to reveal
a further possibility. If religion exercised the symbolic power essential to
the production and reproduction of hegemony and insuring the status quo,
it also provided the immediate language, creolized by local custom and
tradition, for a popularly practiced, often heterodox, “common sense.”
Such an unsystematic, fragmented language can potentially provoke the
communication of that critical self-awareness which Antonio Gramsci
nominated “good sense.” From rural Catholicism in Southern Italy to Ras-
tafarianism in the Caribbean and Islam in the Algerian qasba, these mix-
tures of conservatism and local knowledge are also sites of power.
Similarly, in a significant essay titled “Said, Religion, and Secular Criti-
cism,” Gauri Viswanathan examines Edward Said’s attempt to elaborate
a secular criticism while attentive to the heterogeneous complexities of
Islam as a reasoning, dissenting tradition, opposed to the stereotypical
understanding of a homogeneous consensus. What emerges at this point
is perhaps less the argument that dissenting traditions are the precursors
of modern secularism, but rather like religion itself, that they are deeply
embedded and disseminated within modernity. This, as Viswanathan
The “Unseen Order” 103
notes, raises questions about secularism’s presumed autonomy “as a post-
religious development” (171).
Friends, Foes and Faith

The daily deployment of the lexical index of us and them, notoriously elabo-
rated in the Schmittian distinction between friend and foe, has more recently
been distilled into the numbing binarism and violent insistence of Hunting-
don’s The Clash of Civilizations. Accompanied by rising xenophobia and the
unfolding lexicon of anti-immigration legislation, we today increasingly reg-
ister the violence of the political, juridical and cultural schemata that seeks to
reduce the world into neat, easily identifiable opposites. The problem is that
there does not exist a unique and homogeneous West or East; there is no such
thing as Islam, or Christianity. Over forty years ago, in his Islam Observed,
the anthropologist Clifford Geertz underlined, in their respective crossing
by local currents and conditions, the complex communality in difference of
Islam in then contemporary Morocco and Indonesia. In the Westernization
of the world, the tendency, on the contrary, is toward what Serge Latouche
refers to as the “standardisation of the imaginary” in the context of a “gen-
eralised mimesis.” At this point, the hegemony of the media has apparently
become the immediate measure of truth.
The media seems to surrender to every temptation of reducing reality

and condensing it into a symbol, thrusting the whole issue into discur-
sive disrepair . . . In cinematographic language this fi xed spatial deter-
mination is simply called “a shot”, suggesting that the real is no longer
represented but targeted. In the staccato of television news shots, this
particular shot becomes the symbol that encapsulates the meaning of the
entire drama. It is evident that complex social relations are not negoti-
ated in this frantic manner. (Biemann 45)
To insist on Islam as a thing, invariably condensed in the figure of armed ter-

rorists and veiled women—that is, an image to be confronted, contested and
eventually converted to our way of life—is precisely, as both Edward Said
and Gil Anidjar have argued, to reveal the centrality of religious discourse to
the West. As a category for a distinct sense of understanding—like “race” and
“ethnicity”—“religion” is very much an invention of occidental modernity
and its planetary pedagogy (Anidjar 27). Rey Chow has frequently pointed
out that the separation of the world into distinct histories and cultures, via
area, religious and geo-political studies, is a form of intellectual and his-
torical management that holds out the promise of disciplinary certitude. It
leads to an enormous exercise, along the lines of divide and rule, in cultural
and political power. This is to neatly side-step the crushing verdict delivered
more than seventy years ago from a Fascist prison by Antonio Gramsci:
104 Iain Chambers
The question of religion is to be intended not in terms of a confessional
faith but rather in the secular terms of the unity of belief between a vision
of the world and rules of conduct; but why call this unity of belief “reli-
gion” rather than “ideology”, or more simply “politics”? (Quaderni 1378)
With this we arrive, with Gil Anidjar and the Catholic historian and scholar
of Arab philosophy, Rémi Brague, at the disquieting conclusion that Christi-
anity is in fact the name, acknowledged or not, of Occidental modernity and
globalization.6 Secularism is sustained by a disposition of belief: in the teleo-
logical redemption of time as “progress,” in the calling to redeem the planet
in a unique image and impose a humanist mastery on the cosmos, in the “mis-
sion” to establish the exceptional state, or “city on a hill.” As Gramsci sharply
reminds us, the relationship between religion, the state and political forma-
tions in the West is indissoluble. “The principal elements of common sense
are provided by religion and therefore the relationship between common
sense and religion is much more intimate than that between common sense
and the philosophical systems of the intellectuals” (Quaderni 1396–97).
In the immediacy of inherited beliefs, popular sayings, superstitions, every-
day practices and local custom, that is, in commonsensical understandings
deposited in the textures of everyday life, the subaltern both recognizes herself
while finding there the ambivalent resources of her speech. For what comes
to be said may both confirm and modify, both sustain and subvert, the status
quo. Conjunctural forces, social crises and individual assessment can interrupt
the continuum of common sense, exposing its constructed and contradictory
nature. So, we need to ask ourselves, where do these popular beliefs come
from? How do they acquire coherence? As we have seen, Gramsci attributes
to religion the principal sources of common sense. Those whose conceptions
of the world are largely inscribed in the parameters of an everyday consensus,
for whom a critical education is socially and economically excluded, inevitably
tend to reproduce acritical meanings that sustain a narrative endorsed by reli-
gious finality. Here the Catholic Church reveals its syncretic mastery: combin-
ing religious dogma and peasant, stretching back to pagan, community rites in
a potent synthesis. It is precisely for this reason, as Gramsci argues, that intel-
lectual dissent and critical philosophies are invariably resisted. The tendential
disruption of the everyday world is considered the work of an external and
negative hegemony, seeking to limit the freedom of popular thought and render
it subordinate and marginal. This, of course, is a profoundly political problem.
How is the slippery coherence of common sense, secured in sedimented under-
standings of the religiosity of the universe, to be transformed? This takes us
into a further set of questions, but simply to consider the weight of the religious
underwriting of contemporary politics, in particular in modern occidental soci-
ety, is to register the disturbing heart of the question.
The secular West is sustained by the “unseen order” of religious belief
( James 53). In historical terms this argument would rarely be contested; just
think of the centrality of Christianity in its Protestant variants to the making
of English and British modernity as so meticulously traced by historians,
Catherine Hall and Carolyn Steedman. Yet, to insist on the contemporary
impact of this formation is usually to encounter an uncomfortable silence.
Surely in our modernity, religion is now elsewhere, back there and elsewhere:
the property and problem of someone else? As Leila Ahmed pointed out
some years ago, in their centuries-long struggle for greater freedom and
rights, no one ever suggested that Occidental women should abandon Chris-
tianity, yet it is precisely this option—the abandonment of Islam in order to
embrace modernity—that the West today desires of Muslim women (244).
This, of course, is also to assume that Islam and modernity are separate enti-
ties, and not profoundly entwined and multiplied in both a European and a
planetary formation.
Religion lived as an unseen Occidental order today increasingly reveals
itself, for example, in the moment that Turkish membership of the European
Union is considered. In the end, the objections to Turkey come down to: reli-
gion and the fear of Islam—kebab shops are acceptable, but the idea of pin-
nacled mosques punctuating the skyline of European cities is another matter.
The fact is that secularism, spawned by the Occidental category of religion,
is also the means whereby inequality and hierarchies of racial, ethnic and
gender discrimination are sustained on a global scale. For it is a “discourse
of power that legitimates itself and presents itself as secular as if indifferent to
religion yet producing religion as a (generic) problem” (Anidjar 51). This brings
us to confront the racializing pedagogy of reason and religion: between those
who know and those cast out in ignorance, excluded and rendered inferior
in their religious bigotry and fundamentalism. This, as Gil Anidjar argues, is
to insist on recognizing (and resisting) the interlaced disciplinary procedures
and protocols of religion and race (17). Again, religion in its Christian variants
has been a part of the recent political landscape in Europe for decades—
for example, in the near hegemony of the Christian Democrat parties in
Germany and Italy—but any mention of politicized Islam, for example, in
modern Turkey, actually gripped in the military enforcement of secularism,
is considered an alien threat rather than part of a clearly differentiated but
shared modernity.
Prizing open the intricate interrelationship between occidental secularism
and religion might also allow us to begin to unpack the unexamined faith that
democracy and capitalism somehow coexist in a harmony, sustained by the
laws of the market and the theology of individual freedom. What if, on the con-
trary, they are actually deeply antagonistic? But more on this in a minute.
Blinded by the Image

Of course, one might initially object that many of these observations, in this
case largely inspired by Antonio Gramsci’s observations in the 1930s, have
106 Iain Chambers
been overtaken by events. In the West, the simple, rural peasantry and unruly
working class no longer exist as distinct cultural blocs in any obvious position
of cultural subalternity. Today, the ignorant, rural pastor who repeats plati-
tudes to his illiterate flock is sometimes replaced by the independent, urban
priest who provides a focus in the struggle against crime and corruption. In
the Scampia quarter of Naples, as in the region around Caserta, such figures
have become outspoken leaders against the Camorra, sometime paying for
their opinions with their life. As organic figures of the local community, these
priests provide a cultural, political and moral direction in the absence of
leadership from the state and official cultural agencies. If secular, intellectual
culture continues to remain “external” to the sense of street life and its moral
economy, and the rhetoric of the Catholic hierarchy remains largely unal-
tered, conditions have nevertheless changed. The worldly languages of the
mass media and metropolitan culture have truncated the ancient alliances of
popular superstition, clerical obscurantism, and the public authority of the
Church. At the same time, however, the legislative power registered in the
ubiquitous lexicons of Christianity and the television screen actually betray
far deeper currents, illustrating how the Church has adapted in molecular
ways to the media of contemporary culture, and the fact that Occidental cul-
ture is itself thoroughly Christianized. On this point, Gramsci quotes Croce,
“after Christ we are all christians” (Quaderni 1307). The news shot, the image
and the icon, the television screen and the figure of the Madonna, are deeply
embedded in each other’s agendas.
If to see is to believe, and the image is considered to be “factual” testimony
to the event, then the Occidental vision sustained in Christian iconography—
the whole history of Western art from the late classical period through to the
Baroque and beyond—has hardly been displaced or disrupted by secular moder-
nity. On the contrary, the faith in the immediate visualization of truth—from the
Crucifix, the image of the Madonna, and the subsequent plunge downwards
through TV reality shows to the digital framing of the aerial bombardment of
the not-yet-modern world—is firmly unshaken (Chow, “The Age of the World
Target”). Edward Said suggestively noted that this realism reaffirms Europe’s
historical trajectory; a realism that is sustained in a precise conceptual unity:
[T]he Church and the Holy Roman Empire guarantee the integrity of the
core European literatures. At a still deeper level, it is from the Christian
Incarnation that Western realistic literature as we know it emerges. This
tenaciously advanced thesis explained Dante’s supreme importance to
Auerbach, Curtius, Vossler, and Spitzer. (Culture and Imperialism 45)
If today the aura of the unique artwork fades into the multiplying flux of
the copy, the aura of a seemingly tangible and immediate reality, even if
mediated and manipulated (after all, it is an image, an inscription, a cultural
construction, a pixel configuration), remains undisturbed. “Nature,” the
“human” and “faith” are immediately present and simultaneously removed
from critical concern: they simply are. As Gramsci once suggested, only
a polemical relationship to such an inheritance and hegemony is possible.
Only a critical undoing and overcoming of common sense can lead to a “new
philosophy: this explains the necessity of a polemic with traditional philoso-
phies in the exposition of the philosophy of praxis” (Quaderni 1397).
What emerges clearly from this discussion is the primacy that Gramsci
gives to the generative role of culture in the critical understanding of the
political powers of a historical formation. Power is exercised—that is, it
is not merely applied as a direct force, but is practiced, performed, and
extended in the immediacy of everyday perceptions and languages. Power

does not simply subject; it seeks to convince and hence is both a subjecting
and subjective force (Butler). The centrality and originality of Gramsci’s
thought lies precisely here in the key idea that cultural hegemony has to be
achieved prior to the realization of political power. This evokes a pedagogi-
cal undertaking that seeks in education (understood in the widest sense of
the term) the means able to consistently challenge the status quo, leading
to knowledge that is not an object to be attained and possessed as informa-
tion, but rather a disposition that sustains a critical pedagogy in constant
engagement. Not by chance does the increasing configuration of education
in terms of market criteria, privatization and religious belonging, signal, in
the most blatant of terms, this ongoing struggle for hegemony within the
heartlands of occidental education.
Perhaps the central, if largely unnamed, force of cultural consensus and
conservation in the West is that represented by religion—that is, by Christian-
ity. The continuing silence of intellectuals in the face of the religious elabora-
tion of occidental hegemony, both at home (schooling, public morality, family
values) and abroad (colonialism, imperialism, globalization, liberalism and
their combination in civilizing missions) suggests Christianity’s implicit orga-
nicity to that formation. This very silence betrays complicity, an embarrass-
ment. Religion, like the school and the family, are among those apparatuses
that the French Algerian philosopher, Louis Althusser, incisively referred to
as ideological state apparatuses. ISAs interpellate our individual and collec-
tive formation to the degree that we (mis)recognize ourselves within them
(127–86). Christian values are taken for granted, rendered commonsensi-
cal, by both by those in power and by those subordinate and seemingly in
opposition. Perhaps such values require an altogether more Nietzschean and
Foucauldian style of critical revaluation: the Church, and its violent custody
of ontological truth and belief, has played a formidable role in the formation
of modern, secular society and its global reach and imposition; certainly as
significant as that played by the prison, the clinic, and the invention of sexu-
ality. Perhaps, secularism is another one of those inventions? This suggests
something more than merely an intellectual critique of occidental religion—
whether by classically influenced and pagan-tinged Renaissance humanists,
108 Iain Chambers
or skeptical Enlightenment thinkers. It suggests the need for an altogether
more radical exposition of the archive or archaeology of religion in the West.
In the end, it comes down to a radical revaluation of the Occidental archive;
that is, the critical exposure, undoing and reworking of the powers of a pre-
cise historical and cultural formation.
Here is Antonio Gramsci once again:
It seems to me that the problem is much simpler than it is made to ap-

pear by those who implicitly consider “Christianity” as being inherent to
modern civilization, or lack the courage to raise the question of the rela-
tions between Christianity and modern civilization. . . . the people of the

Orient perceive the hostility which is invisible in our countries because
Christianity has adapted itself molecularly and has become Jesuitism,
that is, a great social hypocrisy. (Prison Notebooks 1: 333)
The Colonization of Democracy

The very closure of the West faced with migratory movements, the
“asymmetrical” relationship between the “internal principles” of liberal
political theory, those evoked in the treatment of “citizens”, and its “ex-
ternal principles”, can justly be considered as the postcolonial fall-out
of the logic of “spatial” domination that has historically accompanied
the construction of liberalism as the hegemonic thought of modernity.
(Mezzadra 83)
While there is much talk these days of the relationship between democracy
and Islam, or of the problems facing Muslim women, we are completely
unaccustomed to posing those questions to Christianity. No one would pre-
sume to talk of women in metropolitan Europe as Christian women, or ask
of Christianity to account for itself in terms of democracy and gender equal-
ity, although in both historical and contemporary terms this is clearly a very
pertinent question (Lazreg 7). It is simply as though Christianity, democracy
and modernity are all one. To adopt for a moment a Durkheimian perspec-
tive, if religion is a symbolic system in which society becomes collectively
conscious of itself, then secular Europe is historically and culturally soaked
in Christian values and their associated belief system. Here it is also worth
recalling the sharp pertinence of Talal Asad’s criticism of Clifford Geertz’s
understanding of religion as a complex cultural system for overlooking the
dimension of power as being decisive for its affi rmation (Genealogies of Reli-
gion). Rather than insist on its historically hybridized realization, at this point
perhaps it might be intellectually and politically more significant to accept
the idea that Europe is fundamentally Christian in its formation; after all,
that is what it tends to believe. Then we can perhaps begin to think about how
to undo this formation. From this threshold it becomes possible to think the
limits of Europe and its religious infrastructure in a critical space that neither
has authorized.
To seek to change the languages of comprehension and (common) sense
is to disrupt an existing consensus and its accompanying order. It means to
rework an existing structural logic. In an altogether more fluid scenario, a
historical bloc cannot appeal to an autonomy unsullied by the forces and
currents that precede and exceed its attempts to grasp and transform the
world, but neither can it simply be construed as an abstract counter-power
located in the anonymous multitude that sustains First World desires for
radicalism. To seek in the external what is most profoundly internal—the
imperious faith in material and metaphysical progress that sustains, however

critically, the liberal and occidental appropriation of the planet in terms of its
economic, political, cultural and religious lexicons—is to avoid the big chill
that accompanies the discomfort of a profound critical interruption. The
occidental institution of philosophy rarely recognizes the full significance of
this critical challenge. When there is seemingly a direct response—Foucault,
Deleuze, Negri and Hardt—it tends to remain locked within the confi rma-
tion of its own discursive horizon. As Gayatri Spivak rightly points out, the
other, as subaltern, multitude, immigrant, sustains rather than shatters, the
authority of the critical paradigm. It is precisely here that the deconstructive
turn within occidental reasoning becomes most suggestive and subversive:
as the internal outside, as the voice that speaks the West without being fully
reducible to the law of its logos—thinking on the threshold of its metaphysical
certainties. Displacing the logic of its language, disseminating an interroga-
tive cut in what Derrida called “globalatinization” and thereby insisting that
not all roads lead to Rome, promotes the undoing and dispersal of such white
mythologies.7 Returning us to a postcolonial insistence, and to the Grams-
cian perspective of thinking in a worldly fashion, we are invited to register
the spatialization and geography of power, and the fact that the Gramscian
Southern Question, in all its diverse peculiarities, today extends itself on a
planetary scale (The Southern Question).
As we are well aware, alongside “the march of liberal democracy in the
twentieth century there has been a gross increase in inequalities of power and
wealth, both locally and globally” (Vázquez-Arroyo 127). Liberal democracy
is full of promises of freedom and equality that it is incapable of delivering;
for it seeks, as Étienne Balibar points out, not equality but equivalence in
the liberal world market (“Debating with Alain Badiou on Universalism”).
This ultimately explains why the liberal-democratic consensus makes so few
demands in terms of democratic participation. Politics is increasingly medi-
ated through the channels (and concentrated powers) of mass communica-
tions that call upon citizen-spectators to verify the truth of the image and
then mandate a government that expects them to remain mute. The very
nature of this state of affairs, in which the interests of the First World are so
intertwined with the direction of the global economy, is far from consonant
110 Iain Chambers
with the “egalitarian and participatory aspirations of democracy” (Balibar).
Liberalism as the motor of such a development is hardly in the position to
transcend this problem except in a vacuous rhetoric where terms like freedom
stand in for the defense of the status quo and the existing distribution of
riches, resources, and power. Crisis and contingency are continually disci-
plined by this premise, and democracy is increasingly denuded of all critical
import, reduced to the disembodied language of tolerance and pluralism.
The question on whose terms participation is permitted brings us back to
Gramsci’s considerations on the margins of history and the exclusion of sub-
altern and popular forces from its defi nition. The vicious state repression of
sporadic and spontaneous peasant revolts seeking rural reform, invariably

nurtured with a sense of justice drawn from popular religious sentiments,
betrays precisely the dark side of a modern secularism intent on sustaining
the separation of religion and the state. Gramsci himself draws from the case
of Davide Lazzaretti, leader of a peasant revolt in the Monte Amiata region
of southern Tuscany, and the priests and peasants involved around the same
period in the mountains of Benevento and Matese, north of Naples, this
potent, popular mixture and its challenge to both lay and religious authority.
Under a left-wing national government, the revolt was squashed and Laz-
zaretti summarily executed by a military fi ring squad in 1878. A radical
religiosity crossed with republican sentiments—on the red flag of Lazzaretti’s
movement was written “The Republic and the kingdom of God”—dramati-
cally exposed institutional power to the limits of its hypocritical rhetoric: just
whose rights and religion were being defended here? (Quaderni 2279–83).
An existing order is privileged over the potential instability of multiple par-
ticipation and the practices of egalitarianism. Meaningful involvement in
political power is blocked precisely in the instance that power itself grows
in increasingly undemocratic and unaccountable concentration. As the cul-
tural, historical and political product of occidental modernity, liberalism is
simultaneously Christian and in confl ict with the full reaches of democracy
when voiced in the moral languages of republicanism and religion seeking a
justice yet to come.
When structural and institutional questions of power are reduced to
debates over policy decisions and generic intent, then questions of justice
and freedom—for whom, where, when and how—are diverted into appeals
to an abstract humanity by which the whole world is colonized and its het-
erogeneous challenge sequestered and subsequently silenced. This logic can
take many forms and degrees of sophistication, but in the end it is reduced
to the bluntness of “You’re either with us—the West and its ‘democracy,’
‘progress,’ ‘civilization’ (and implicitly its Christianity)—or against us.” Just
as in the hierarchical order of racialized colors where whiteness goes unan-
nounced, so in the sphere of religion the hegemonic formation does not
need to be nominated. Non-Christians can only be considered trespassers
in (Occidental) modernity, for they are structurally excluded. We are all
expected to respect the economical, juridical, and cultural laws of such a
perspective, and those of us in difficulty are expected to work harder in
order to enter the frame, certainly not to question, disrupt, or rearticulate its
premises. In this sense, liberalism has fully colonized democracy, reducing
it to a smiling mask and public masque, and its language to an infi nite and
ineffectual ventriloquism.
The Violence of Secularism

The liberal violence to which I refer (as opposed to the violence of il-
liberal regimes) is translucent. It is the violence of universalizing reason

itself. (Asad, Formations of the Secular 59)
Tied deeply into the largely unrecognized nexus between religion and secu-
larism as a historical and cultural formation is the question of tradition. This
is not to suggest the seemingly obvious idea of tradition as the source of
religious rites, customs and beliefs that survive and live on in the complex
currents of modernity, but rather to insist that in the narratives of continuity,
in the faith in the uniqueness of Occidental progress, in the narration of the
nation as the privileged locus of identificatory practices, a metaphysics of
belief, formed and disciplined by Christianity, remains unchallenged. Here,
of course, we are conversing with Friedrich Nietzsche and his acerbic critique
of the “slave mentality” of modernity, but we are also joined by Gramsci and
his insistence on the political function of Christianity in the manufacture of
common sense and a world outlook whose secular affi rmation is inextricably
bound to centuries of religious incubation. As an uncanny insistence, taken,
transformed and translated into secular visions, the continuing dissemina-
tion of a transcendental authority—from baptism to the cemetery—is undeni-
ably still fi rmly in place.8 As an integrating force, as a form of social glue
and cultural cohesion, the atemporal values of Christianity seemingly legiti-
mate a tradition (transformed, rendered modern) that is ours. Once again,
in a Durkheimian sense, this may well be its function. However, we also
need to critically prize open that seemingly neutral factor, and insist on the
more uncomfortable perspective that as a disseminated form of power, as a
molecularization of transcendental authority, Christianity continues to pro-
vide and legitimate the largely unquestioned and unseen order of the West.
To argue that people in the West feel the need for Christianity in order to
domesticate and make sense of the world may well be true, but it may also be
the case that such a need blocks other horizons of sense, obscures other, less
provincial and more beneficial, structures of belief. In this sense, Christianity
becomes the name of the pathology of the West. If, these days, public leaders
are increasingly arguing that Christianity should be formally acknowledged
in the founding discourse and identitarian touchstone of Europe and the
Occident (thereby excising the creolizing prospects of the pagan Greeks and
112 Iain Chambers
Romans, along with the heretical monotheisms of Judaism and Islam), then
Western modernity loses its exceptional secular state. It becomes coeval,
crossed, divided and contested by the very same forces—religion—that it
seeks to expel into the backward and underdeveloped margins of its empire.
To prize open this Occidental archive, and to dirty its shelves with these
heretical and unauthorized matters—paganism, Judaism and Islam—is to pro-
pose an altogether more unruly study of modern secularism. Restored to
its inconclusive becoming, as a complex and often indeterminate series of
cultural and historical processes that are currently underway, this heritage
incisively impacts on any critical understanding of the modern languages of
the law, the state, and governmentality.

Secularization, as the seemingly progressive disinvestment in the institu-
tions and rites of religious certainties, turns out to be a homeopathic force.
It does not cancel Christianity: the theology of individual redemption and
teleological progress rather doubles and disseminates the belief system of
modernity’s historical winners. Monuments to wars fought, territories con-
quered and the world converted to its beliefs—European cities are brimming
with these signs and symbols—propose a moral economy that considers itself
the judge of mankind. God may well have abandoned his long hair and flow-
ing robes for a sharp haircut, a business suit, or a military uniform, but he
has certainly not forsaken the transcendental power of the West. 9
The assumption is that whereas “the West” is greater than and has
surpassed the stage of Christianity, its principal religion, the world of
Islam—its varied societies, histories, and languages notwithstanding—is
still mired in religion, primitivity and backwardness. Therefore, the
West is modern, greater than the sum of its parts, full of enriching con-
tradictions and yet always “Western” in its cultural identity; the world of
Islam, on the other hand, is no more than “Islam”, reducible to a small
number of unchanging characteristics. (Said, Covering Islam 10 –11)
Thinking the relationship between the presumptions of an internal secu-

larism (Europe, the West and its modernity) and an externalized religious
world (Islam, the South of the planet and its underdevelopment), an alto-
gether more complex picture emerges. Conjoined with the state, secular-
ism becomes the name of a governmentality and the management of faith,
belief and religion through modern technologies of power, and certainly
not, as we are usually taught, the realization of a post-religious society.
Exploring what Tasal Asad refers to as the epistemological assumptions
of the secular, and its imbrications in the practices and technologies of
modern power, we register that secularism is not really about personal
choice, or the identification of an individual or collective state isolated
from religion (Genealogies of Religion 25). It is rather a discursive formation
that is among the necessary conditions of a historical and cultural matrix,
addressing the mediation and management of beliefs and convictions in
the formation and direction of modern power and politics.
Stripping away the secular does not so much reveal the religious infra-
structure of our faith in modernity as expose the conjunctural constellation
that is simultaneously sustained and sutured by religion, secularism and
the institutional and everyday powers they exercise in shaping the hori-
zons of sense.10 In this sense, both public and private spheres as sites of
the dispositions of power are already and simultaneously “christianized”
and secularized. The secular and the sacred are in fact entwined in the
French Revolution and the political birth of modern mass politics where
“the sacralisation of individual citizen and collective people expresses a

form of naturalized power” (Asad, Genealogies of Religion 32). Concepts
such as freedom and the individual, essential to the grammar of the mod-
ern state, become sacred and a redeeming force for the world; secularism,
as Talal Asad insists, is a political doctrine (56).
Learning from Islam

What has occurred? To refer to the intertwining of liberalism and religion
in the Europe of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is, as we noted,
quite acceptable in historical and cultural terms. It is understood in both
sociological and philosophical perspectives to be central to the making of
occidental modernity. Yet when we turn to the present there is a silence,
as though that argument and, in particular, that formation that is also and
always a formation of power, has somehow fallen into disuse. Of course,
political and cultural configurations shift and change, they are contingent;
however, there has been no epistemological rupture, no radical revaluation
of values. We are right to suspect that this previous order, even if displaced
and unacknowledged, continues to discipline the core of the European pub-
lic and private sphere, its technologies of power, and its bio-politics. Talk of
Turkey’s entrance into the European Union in Germany, or of headscarves
in France, and that inherited corpus of thought and practices immediately
springs into life to sound the chord of the “lasting trauma” of Islam for
Christianity (Said, Orientalism 59). In a seemingly secularized modernity
we continue to grapple with the ghosts of a formation that refuses to pass
away. At this point, the apparently sharp separation, and subsequent oppo-
sition, between secularism and religion falls, dissolved into an altogether
more ambivalent fluidity. Secularism itself becomes problematic. As a
social and cultural practice it, too, is caught, suspended and sustained in a
constellation—occidental modernity—in which Christianity and its variants
was, and is, essential to its hegemony.
This is clearly, both in historical and philosophical terms, a complicated
argument that requires a careful unwinding in order to identify its multiple
modalities and affects. What—and thinking of Gramsci’s many meditations
114 Iain Chambers
on the question of religion, popular culture, the institutional powers of
Catholicism, and the realization of hegemony—becomes clear is that liberal-
ism, secularism, and religion are not distinct categories to be contrasted, but
rather provide the critical triangulation of a specific historical formation and
its subsequent political and cultural configurations. Perhaps, and referring to
the provocative title of this section, it might be instructive to look elsewhere
for a moment. This is not in order to fi nd a better realization of the role of
religion in social and political life, but rather, in considering other forms
and formulations, it helps us to register the limits of a specific constellation
peculiar to the West that considers its perspectives universal and its solutions
inevitably the most civilized and morally superior. Christianity, at this point,
is the moral adjudicator of modern (Occidental) civilization. Gramsci suc-
cinctly acknowledged such presumptions in his short comparative analysis
in the Quaderni del carcere of Islam and Christianity and their relationship
to modernity. In both, he notes that it is not religion per se that is unable to
molecularly adapt itself to modernity, but social and historical structures—
such as feudalism and cultural isolation—that create obstacles to that process.
Gramsci goes even further. He suggests that the absence of a massive reli-
gious hierarchy and the institutional powers of a Church makes Islam poten-
tially even more susceptible to eventual transformation and modernization.
He concludes: “Christianity has taken nine centuries to evolve and adapt,
and it has done so in small steps, etc.; Islam is forced into a headlong rush”
(Prison Notebooks 1: 333).
In an important, pathbreaking essay that opens up the critically intercul-
tural space within modernity, Armando Salvatore and Mark LeVine have
carefully examined the question of the public sphere and technologies of
power in modern Muslim majority countries. Considering the centrality of
the Islamic concept and legal method of Istislah for seeking the social good
through mediation, compromise and consensus as being central to a Mus-
lim understanding of the public sphere, they contrast this practice with the
abstract, universal categories of law and justice that sustain the conceptual
violence and frequently punishing modalities of reason in the West. Their
argument is that the public sphere, in its singular occidental abstractness,
excludes other kinds of reason, and cancels the understanding of its own par-
ticular historical formation. They then extend their analysis through a Grams-
cian reading, attentive to the historical textures and cultural sentiments and
formation of Islamic notions of custom, ‘urf, and habits or ‘adat, where ideas
such as the public sphere and justice are certainly not absent, but neither are
they simply poor copies of their Occidental counterparts. The very sense
of the public, for historical and cultural reasons, is figured differently. It is
neither transparent nor readily translatable to Western reasoning.11 As such it
marks not simply a difference but proposes a profound critical challenge.
What emerges most clearly from Salvatore’s and LeVine’s analysis is the
Occidental lynchpin of the private citizen who, after all, “is just one—albeit
historically powerful and largely hegemonic—practiced and theorized
approach to the public sphere” (7). In the manner in which the public sphere
is embedded in the dynamics of the modern Muslim world, “secularly ori-
ented rationality” is exposed to be not the only normative language for pub-
lic life (Salvatore and LeVine 7). All of this stretches and reformulates the
Gramscian understanding of civil society to include multiple social and cul-
tural articulations on which “alternative hegemonic configurations of pub-
licness in the Muslim majority world and elsewhere base their forces and
sometimes legitimacy” (Salvatore and LeVine 7). In this altogether more
complex conceptual mix, everyday practices and spaces receive and rework
religion and tradition as forms of ongoing negotiation, mediation, refusal

and resistance to an order that may be simultaneously local, national and
international. This is close to Gramsci’s understanding of the hold of the
counter-hegemonic prospects of popular religion and its implicit desire for
social justice among the peasants of Southern Italy.
Remaining on the edge of this critical fault-line, where European catego-
ries do not readily transmute into other historical heritages, and recogniz-
ing that religion itself continues to haunt the very heart of the West, we are
confronted with the task, already elaborated in different ways by Talal Asad
and Gil Anidjar, of “provincializing” secular modernity. In particular, as
Salvatore and LeVine rightly insist, the myth of liberal politics secured in the
figure of free, autonomous subjects and their associated decisional power, is
rendered altogether more problematic. The complexity of forces that render
accessibility to public recognition difficult, unequal and frequently unjust,
transforms the abstract concept of the individual into an altogether less reas-
suring figure, certainly decentered and depotentialized with respect to the
autonomous powers assumed and assured by the modern myth of citizen-
ship (Asad, Formations of the Secular 5). If in Occidental liberalism the state
is premised on the apparently sharp distinction and subsequent contracts
between the public and the private spheres, Salvatore and LeVine argue that
other forms of public participation emerge when public reason is based on
“a practical reason sanctified by religious tradition, however variably inter-
preted. Such a perspective provides these discourses with a level of fluidity
and adaptability that account in large measure for their success in mobilizing
large numbers of people in their cause” (29).
While the authors justly underline that this fluid ambivalence cannot be
automatically labeled subaltern or counter-hegemonic, they argue that ideas
of public welfare and social justice are entwined in a complex sociopoliti-
cal matrix. Here in an historical formation in which change is in custody
to local coordinates and conditions, tradition—those popular forms of cul-
tural life and religious customs that Gramsci analyzed—also provides and
provokes sites of transformation. This is to think with Gramsci where the
practice of reasoning occurs, inaugurating a potential passage from common
to good sense: in the traditions of the religious lexicon of southern Italian
116 Iain Chambers
Catholicism, in the multiple and differentiated localities of modern Muslim
communities. This is not to praise Islam (or Catholicism), or to extract from
modern Muslim society an improved prospect of the common good. Rather,
in contrasting the fluidity and embedded response to the forces of modernity
with the abstract rigidity of occidental categorization, an intercultural cri-
tique is rendered possible: sense is not a category but, evoking a lineage that
runs from Ibn Khaldûn through Giambattista Vico to Marx and Gramsci,
an historical and cultural practice. This suggests that modern ideas of social
justice and public welfare have a complex history in diverse cultural forma-
tions. These cannot be reduced to an Occidental version whose abstraction
pretends universal validity.

Outside and beyond the liberal repertoire of tolerance, integration, and
assimilation in which Occidental categories are secured as the norm, largely
immune from criticism, it becomes altogether more pressing to elaborate
the idea of a new public sphere that will challenge hegemonic power forma-
tions whose authority may be predominantly considered religious or secular.
What was once considered to be the property and privilege of the West—
the knowledges, practices and institutions that inform justice, well-being and
freedom—will come, as Edward Said and Gayatri Spivak might put it, to be
“worlded” in a manner that confronts its “widespread social hyprocrisy,” and
pose a challenge to its particular authority. There exist other ways of being
in the world, of being in modernity.
Returning religion to secular Europe, the fundamental point here is that
Islam is not simply in Europe, but also profoundly of Europe. Today, this is
not only the case among its immigrant populations from Asia, but has been
so for well over a thousand years (that is, for a longer period than Christian-
ity has existed around much of the Baltic Sea): medieval Islamic Spain, Sicily
and Malta, the Ottoman Empire, and the medieval and modern Balkans. In
other words, Islam refers to an internal component in the making of modern
Europe and not simply the externalized other that mirrors European fears
and self-fashioning. “Muslims are clearly present in a secular Europe and yet
in an important sense absent from it. The problem of understanding Islam
in Europe is primarily, so I claim, a matter of understanding how ‘Europe’ is
conceptualized by Europeans” (Asad, Formations of the Secular 159).
Historically, Islamic culture represented not simply the transmission of
classical learning to medieval Europe, but was the site of a fundamental
transformation and translation of that knowledge into modern concepts and
concerns: from philosophy to agriculture, from poetry to medicine. Like
today’s unwelcomed immigrant, this externalized and expelled body decen-
ters and dispels the unquestioned referent of an autochthonous Europe and
its elaboration in autonomous national components. The presumed homo-
geneity of a European space, temporality and identity is challenged by an
altogether more complex, unstable geography, home to multiple rhythms,
accents and compositions. Here, the assumed autonomy of the individual,
the presumed secularism of the state, the triumph of reason and the progres-
sive universalism of its culture is interceded and interrupted by ongoing
practices and possibilities in which traditions, translations and other modes
of reasoning exceed the liberal coordinates of Occidental hegemony. Moder-
nity is transformed from an existing state into a potential, folded into diverse
“worldings” of the world whose dynamic and unpredictable outcome, as
Gramsci always warned us, is ultimately unknown (Heidegger 170).
It is precisely in this expanded world that we are confronted with the
paradoxical fulfi llment of religion as a secular power. The fi nal point here,
and returning to Gramsci’s insistence on the intricate interrelationship of
Christianity and modernity, is that Occidental religious belief is not, as Max

Weber taught us, simply transferred into the seemingly secular imperative
of individual self-realization in the modern capitalist order and a boundless
faith in rationalism. This understanding of secular conduct and salvation is
itself essential to the formation and realization of today’s planetary bio-power
and politics. We are not simply referring to observable rites and customs,
and Europe, for example, is saturated in these, but to the ongoing practices
that reveal the religious infrastructure of the West’s belief in itself. Through
the racialization of the world in hierarchies of cultural value that mirror the
historically sanctified ethnic superiority of the West, Occidental humanism,
as the assumed epistemological and moral origin of knowledge, continues to
propose its mission of worldly redemption in terms that are simultaneously
racist and religious. In the persistence of race and religion as discrimina-
tory categories, which continue to distinguish and subordinate both the non-
Occidental world and its internal populations, past sentiments sedimented in
the mishmash familiarity of common sense, invariably rush in to offer expla-
nation for the existing bio-political order.12 Attentive to the intricate weave
of cultural textures, to their historical formation and conjunctural power,
Gramsci’s acute understanding of his present and our modernity, permits
us to begin to excavate this archeology. It is there that we can uncover the
unacknowledged faith and belief of modern secularism—that is, as Gramsci
pointed out, its politics: the power to defi ne and decide. In the seemingly sec-
ular reach of Occidental empire, in its presumed ethical and ethnical preemi-
nence, we come to discover the ancient rhythms of a theological heartbeat.
Notes
1. Chraibi 23; my translation.

2. Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere. All the translations from the Quaderni are mine.
3. Anidjar, Semites: Race, Religion, Literature 47.
4. See Jedlowski.
5. Here is Gilles Deleuze describing Pasolini’s cinema: “[W]hat characterises
Pasolini’s cinema is a poetic consciousness, which is not strictly aestheticist
or technicist, but rather mystical or ‘sacred.’ This allows Pasolini to bring the
118 Iain Chambers
perception-image, or the neurosis of his characters, on to a level of vulgarity and
bestiality in the lowest subject-matter, while reflecting them in a pure, poetic
consciousness, animated by the mythical or sacralising element” (77).
6. Anidjar 40; Brague’s thesis is well explored in Salvatore 29–56.
7. Jacques Derrida, Rogues: Two Essays on Reason; Robert Young, White Mythologies:
Writing History and the West.
8. The presence of Christianity in everyday life in the West—from the news of
the pope every evening on all channels of Italian television, the ubiquity of
the cross in public schools and hospitals, to being a fashion accessory around
people’s necks accompanied by the public expression of faith by major political
leaders—is often in striking contrast to the altogether more discreet civic pres-
ence of Islam in many Muslim countries.

9. This is an ironic reference to Durkheim’s idea of religion as the transcendental
power of society itself.
10. For further discussion on the intertwining of religion and secularism in the for-
mation of modernity, see Taylor.
11. For example, the Habermasian conception of the “public sphere,” and its rigid
dependency upon the liberal category of the “private citizen” (Salvatore and
LeVine 5–7).
12. See Ash Amin, “The Remainders of Race.”
6 Gramsci in the
Twenty-First Century
Partha Chatterjee
Peasant Society Today
The fi rst volume of Subaltern Studies was published in 1982, twenty-five years
ago. I was part of the editorial group that launched, under the leadership of
Ranajit Guha, this critical engagement with postcolonial modernity from the
standpoint of the subaltern classes, especially the peasantry. In the quarter
of a century since then, there has been, I believe, a fundamental change in
the historical situation of postcoloniality. The new conditions under which
global flows of capital, commodities, information, and people are now reg-
ulated—a complex set of phenomena generally clubbed under the category
of globalization—have created both new opportunities and new obstacles for
postcolonial countries. The old idea of a Third World sharing a common
history of colonial oppression and backwardness is no longer as persuasive
as it was in the 1960s. The trajectory of economic growth taken by the coun-
tries of Asia has diverged radically from that of most African countries. The
phenomenal growth of China and India in recent years has set in motion
a process of social change that, in its scale and speed, is unprecedented in
human history.
It is now well known that Subaltern Studies was inspired by the prison writ-
ings of Antonio Gramsci in which he sketched a methodological outline for
a “history of the subaltern classes.” In these writings, Gramsci used the word
subalterno (subaltern) in at least two senses. In one, he used it as a code for the
industrial proletariat. But against the thrust of orthodox Marxist thinking, he
emphasized that in its rise to power, the bourgeoisie did not simply impose a
domination through the coercive apparatus of the state, but transformed the
cultural and ideological institutions of civil society to construct a hegemony
over society as a whole, even eliciting in the process the acquiescence of
the subaltern classes. In Gramsci’s analysis of capitalist society, the central
place is occupied by questions such as the relation of state and civil society,
the connections between the nation, the people, the bourgeoisie and other
ruling classes, the role of intellectuals in creating the social hegemony of the
bourgeoisie, strategies for building a counter-hegemonic alliance, and so on.
In the second sense, Gramsci talked of the subaltern classes in pre-capitalist
120 Partha Chatterjee
social formations. Here he was referring to the more general relationship of
domination and subordination in class-divided societies. But specifically in
the context of Southern Italy, he wrote about the subordination of the peas-
antry. Gramsci was very critical of the negative and dismissive attitude of
European Marxists toward the culture, beliefs, practices, and political poten-
tial of the peasantry. Positioning himself against this attitude, he wrote about
the distinct characteristics of peasants, the religious beliefs and practices,
language and cultural products, the everyday lives and struggles, and of the
need for revolutionary intellectuals to study and understand them. But he
also highlighted the limits of peasant consciousness, which was fragmented,
passive and dependent, contrasted with the comprehensiveness, originality

and active historical dynamism of the ruling classes. Even at moments of
resistance, peasant consciousness remained enveloped by the dominant ide-
ologies of the ruling classes. These discussions by Gramsci were turned to
productive use by historians of South Asia writing in the 1980s.
Twenty-five years later, I believe it is important for scholars of Asia to
revisit the question of the peasantry in postcolonial societies. This is not
because I think the advance of capitalist industrial growth is inevitably
breaking down peasant communities and turning peasants into proletarian
workers, as predicted innumerable times in the last century and a half. On
the contrary, I will argue that the forms of capitalist industrial growth in the
twenty-fi rst century may, in large agrarian countries like China, India and
the countries of Southeast Asia, make room for the preservation of peasant
production and peasant cultures, but under completely altered conditions.
The analysis of these emergent forms of postcolonial capitalism requires new
conceptual work in which, I will now argue, the writings of Gramsci continue
to be of great analytical value.
Let me begin by referring to a series of recent incidents of violent agi-
tations in different regions of India against the acquisition of agricultural
land for industry. The most talked-about incidents occurred in a place called
Nandigram in West Bengal where there was a proposal to acquire 14,000
acres of agricultural land to set up a special economic zone for chemical
industries. In January 2008, when news spread of the possible acquisition of
land, armed villagers chased out all government officials, policemen and sup-
porters of the ruling Communist Party; dug up roads, destroyed bridges and
sealed off the entire area to outsiders. After a standoff lasting two months,
when the police and government supporters tried to enter the area by force,
fourteen villagers were killed in police shootings. Even after the government
announced that the chemical industry zone would be located elsewhere, the
area continues to be disturbed.
If these incidents had taken place twenty-five years ago, we would have
seen in them the classic signs of peasant insurgency. Here were the long-
familiar features of a peasantry, tied to the land, and small-scale agriculture,
united by the cultural and moral bonds of a local rural community, resisting
Gramsci in the Twenty-First Century 121
the agents of an external state and city-based commercial institutions by
using both peaceful and violent means. Our analysis could have drawn on
a long tradition of anthropological studies of peasant societies, focusing on
the characteristic forms of dependence of peasant economies on external
institutions such as the state and dominant classes, including landlords, mon-
eylenders and traders, but also of the forms of autonomy in peasant cultures
based on the solidarity of a local moral community. We could have also
linked our discussion to a long tradition of political debates over the his-
torical role of the peasantry under conditions of capitalist growth, beginning
with the Marxist analysis in Western Europe of the inevitable dissolution of
the peasantry as a result of the process of primitive accumulation of capital,

Lenin’s debates in Russia with the Narodniks, Mao Zedong’s analysis in the
Chinese Revolution, and the continuing debates over Gandhi’s vision of a
free India where a mobilized peasantry in the villages would successfully
resist the spread of industrial capitalism and the violence of the modern
state. Moreover, using the insights drawn from Antonio Gramsci’s writings,
we could have talked about the contradictory consciousness of the peasantry
in which it was both dominated by the forms of the elite culture of the ruling
classes and, at the same time, resistant to them. Twenty-five years ago, we
would have seen these rural agitations in terms of the analysis provided by
Ranajit Guha in his classic work Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in
Colonial India.
I believe that analysis would be inappropriate today. The reasons are the
following. First, the spread of governmental technologies in the postcolonial
world in the last three decades, as a result of the deepening reach of the
developmental state, has meant that the state is no longer an external entity
to the peasant community. Governmental agencies distributing education,
health services, food, roadways, water, electricity, agricultural technology,
emergency relief and dozens of other welfare services have penetrated deep
into the interior of everyday peasant life. Not only are peasants dependent
on state agencies for these services, but they have also acquired consider-
able skill, albeit to a different degree in different areas, in manipulating and
pressurizing these agencies to deliver benefits. Institutions of the state, or
at least governmental agencies (whether state or non-state), have become
internal aspects of the peasant community. Second, the spate of reforms
in the structure of agrarian property, whether revolutionary as in China or
gradual as in most parts of India and the other countries of Southeast Asia,
has meant that except in isolated pockets, for the fi rst time in centuries,
peasants no longer directly confront an exploiting class within the village,
as in feudal or semi-feudal conditions. This has had consequences that are
completely new for the range of strategies of peasant politics. Third, since
the tax on land or agricultural produce is no longer a significant source of
revenue for modern governments, the relation of the state to the peasantry
is no longer directly extractive, as it often was in the past. Fourth, with the
rapid growth of cities and industrial regions, the possibility of peasants mak-
ing a shift to urban and non-agricultural occupations is no longer a function
of their pauperization and forcible separation from the land, but is often a
voluntary choice, shaped by the perception of new opportunities and new
desires. Fifth, with the spread of school education and widespread exposure
to modern communications media such as the cinema, television and adver-
tising, there is a strong and widespread desire among younger members of
peasant families, both male and female, not to live as peasants in the village,
but to move to the town or the city despite the hardships and uncertainties
because of its lure of anonymity and upward mobility. This is particularly
significant for countries like India, where the life of poor peasants in rural
society is marked not only by the disadvantage of class but also by the dis-
criminations of caste, compared to which the sheer anonymity of life in the
city is often seen as liberating.
A New Conceptual Framework

I may have emphasized the novelty of the present situation too sharply; in
actual fact, the changes have undoubtedly come more gradually over time.
But I do believe that the novelty needs to be stressed at this time in order to
ask, how do these new features of peasant life affect our received theories of
the place of the peasantry in postcolonial countries? Kalyan Sanyal, an econ-
omist teaching in Kolkata, has attempted a fundamental revision of these
theories in his recent book Rethinking Capitalist Development.1 This work, I
think, well represents a new phase of using Gramsci to understand economic
and political changes in postcolonial societies of the twenty-fi rst century.
The key concept in Sanyal’s analysis is the primitive accumulation of cap-
ital—sometimes called primary or original accumulation of capital. Like
Sanyal, I too prefer to use this term in Marx’s sense to mean the dissociation
of the laborer from the means of labor. There is no doubt that this is the
key historical process that brings peasant societies into crisis with the rise
of capitalist production. Marx’s analysis in the last chapters of Volume 1 of
Capital shows that the emergence of modern capitalist industrial production
is invariably associated with the parallel process of the loss of the means of
production on the part of primary producers such as peasants and artisans.
The unity of labor with the means of labor, which is the basis of most pre-
capitalist modes of production, is destroyed and a mass of laborers emerge
who no longer possess the means of production. Needless to say, the unity
of labor with the means of labor is the conceptual counterpart in political
economy of the organic unity of most pre-capitalist rural societies by vir-
tue of which peasants and rural artisans are said to live in close bonds of
solidarity in a local rural community. This is the familiar anthropological
description of peasant societies as well as the source of inspiration for many
romantic writers and artists portraying rural life. This is also the unity that
is destroyed in the process of primitive accumulation of capital, throwing
peasant societies into crisis.
The analysis of this crisis has produced, as I have already indicated, a
variety of historical narratives ranging from the inevitable dissolution of
peasant societies to slogans of worker–peasant unity in the building of a
future socialist society. Despite their differences, the common feature in
all these narratives is the idea of transition. Peasants and peasant societies
under conditions of capitalist development are always in a state of transition-
–whether from feudalism to capitalism or from pre-capitalist backwardness
to socialist modernity.
A central argument made by Sanyal in his book is that under present

conditions of postcolonial development within a globalized economy, the
narrative of transition is no longer valid. That is to say, although capitalist
growth in a postcolonial society such as India is inevitably accompanied by
the primitive accumulation of capital, the social changes that are brought
about cannot be understood as a transition. How is that possible?
The explanation has to do with the transformations in the last two decades
in the globally dispersed understanding about the minimum functions as
well as the available technologies of government. There is a growing sense
now that certain basic conditions of life must be provided to people every-
where and that if the national or local governments do not provide them,
someone else must, whether it is other states, international agencies, or non-
governmental organizations. Thus, while there is a dominant discourse about
the importance of growth, which in recent times has come to mean almost
exclusively capitalist growth, it is, at the same time, considered unaccept-
able that those who are dispossessed of their means of labor because of the
primitive accumulation of capital should have no means of subsistence. This
produces, says Sanyal, a curious process in which, on the one side, primary
producers such as peasants, craftspeople and petty manufacturers lose their
land and other means of production, but, on the other, are also provided by
governmental agencies with the conditions for meeting their basic needs of
livelihood. There is, says Sanyal, primitive accumulation as well as a parallel
process of the reversal of the effects of primitive accumulation.
It would be useful to illustrate this process with some examples. Histori-
cally, the process of industrialization in all agrarian countries has meant
the eviction of peasants from the land, either because the land was taken
over for urban or industrial development or because the peasant no longer
had the resources to cultivate the land. Market forces were usually strong
enough to force peasants to give up the land, but oftentimes, direct coer-
cion was used by means of the legal and fi scal powers of the state. From
colonial times, government authorities in India have used the right of emi-
nent domain to acquire lands to be used for “public purposes,” offering
only a token compensation, if any. The idea that peasants losing land must
be resettled somewhere else and rehabilitated into a new livelihood was
rarely acknowledged. Historically, it has been said that the opportunities
of migration of the surplus population from Europe to the settler colonies
in the Americas and elsewhere made it possible to politically manage
the consequences of primitive accumulation in Europe in the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries. No such opportunities exist today for India or
China. More importantly, the technological conditions of early industrial-
ization that created the demand for a substantial mass of industrial labor
have long passed. Capitalist growth today is far more capital-intensive and
technology-dependent than it was even some decades ago. Today, large
sections of peasants who are victims of the primitive accumulation of capi-
tal are completely unlikely to be absorbed into the new capitalist sectors of
growth. Therefore, without a specific government policy of resettlement,
the peasants losing their land face the possibility of the complete loss of
their means of livelihood. Under present globally prevailing normative
ideas, this is considered unacceptable. Hence, the old-fashioned methods
of putting down peasant resistance by armed repression have little chance
of gaining legitimacy. The result is the widespread demand today for the
rehabilitation of displaced people who lose their means of subsistence
because of industrial and urban development. It is not, says Sanyal, as
though primitive accumulation is halted or even slowed down, for primi-
tive accumulation is the inevitable companion to capitalist growth. Rather,
governmental agencies have to fi nd the resources to, as it were, reverse the
consequences of primitive accumulation by providing alternative means
of livelihood to those who have lost them.
We know that it is not uncommon for developmental states to protect cer-
tain sectors of production that are currently the domain of peasants, artisans
and small manufacturers against competition from large corporate fi rms.
But this may be interpreted as an attempt to forestall primitive accumulation
itself by preventing corporate capital from entering into areas such as food
crop or vegetable production or handicraft manufacture. However, there are
many examples in many countries, including India, of governments and non-
government agencies offering easy loans to enable those without the means
of sustenance to fi nd gainful employment. Such loans are often advanced
without serious concern for profitability or the prospect of the loan being
repaid, since the money advanced here is not driven by the motive of further
accumulation of capital, but rather by that of providing the livelihood needs
of the debtors—that is to say, by the motive of reversal of the effects of primi-
tive accumulation. In recent years, these efforts have acquired the status of a
globally circulating technology of poverty management: a notable instance
is the micro-credit movement initiated by the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh
and its founder, the Nobel Prize–winner Mohammed Yunus. Most of us are
familiar now with stories of peasant women in rural Bangladesh forming
groups to take loans from Grameen Bank to undertake small activities to
supplement their livelihood and putting pressure on one another to repay the
loan so that they can qualify for another round of credit. Similar activities
have been introduced quite extensively in India in recent years.
Finally, as in other countries, government agencies in India provide some
direct benefits to people who, because of poverty or other reasons, are unable
to meet their basic consumption needs. This could be in the form of special
poverty-removal programs, or schemes of guaranteed employment in public
works, or even direct delivery of subsidized or free food. Thus, there are pro-
grams of supplying subsidized food grains to those designated as “below the
poverty line,” guaranteed employment for up to a hundred days in the year,
and free meals to children in primary schools. All of these may be regarded,
in terms of our analysis, as direct interventions to reverse the effects of primi-

tive accumulation.
It is important to point out that except for the last example of direct provi-
sion of consumption needs, the other mechanisms of reversing the effects of
primitive accumulation involve the intervention of the market. This is the
other significant difference in the present conditions of peasant life from
the traditional models we have known. Except in certain marginal pockets,
peasant and craft production in India today is fully integrated into a market
economy. Unlike a few decades ago, there is almost no sector of household
production that can be described as intended wholly for self-consumption
or non-monetized exchange within a local community. Virtually all peasant
and artisan production is for sale in the market and all consumption needs
are purchased from the market. This, as we shall see, has an important bear-
ing on recent changes in the conditions of peasant politics.
Transformed Structures of Political Power

To place these changes within a structural frame that describes how political
power is held and exercised in postcolonial India, I also need to provide an
outline of the transformation that, I believe, has taken place in that struc-
ture in recent years. Here, once again, Indian scholars have sought help
from Antonio Gramsci. Twenty-five years ago, the structure of state power in
India was usually described by scholars in terms of a coalition of dominant
classes—namely, the capitalists, the rich farmers and the bureaucracy—com-
peting and aligning with one another within a political space supervised by a
relatively autonomous state.2 The dominant class coalition model was given
a robust theoretical shape in a classic essay by Sudipta Kaviraj in which, by
using Antonio Gramsci’s idea of the “passive revolution” as a blocked dia-
lectic, he was able to ascribe to the process of class domination in postcolo-
nial India its own dynamic.3 Power had to be shared between the dominant
classes because no one class had the ability to exercise hegemony on its own.
But “sharing” was a process of ceaseless push and pull, with one class gaining
a relative ascendancy at one point, only to lose it at another. Kaviraj provided
us with a synoptic political history of the relative dominance and decline of
the industrial capitalists, the rural elites and the bureaucratic-managerial
elite within the framework of the passive revolution of capital.
The characteristic features of the passive revolution in India as described
twenty years ago were the relative autonomy of the state as a whole from
the bourgeoisie and the landed elites; the supervision of the state by an
elected political leadership, a permanent bureaucracy, and an independent
judiciary; the negotiation of class interests through a multi-party electoral
system; a protectionist regime discouraging the entry of foreign capital and
promoting import substitution; the leading role of the state sector in heavy
industry, infrastructure, transport, telecommunications; banking, and so
on; state control over the private manufacturing sector through a regime of
licensing; and the relatively greater influence of industrial capitalists over the
central government and that of the landed elites on the state governments.
Passive revolution was a form that was marked by its difference from clas-
sical bourgeois democracy. But to the extent that capitalist democracy as
established in Western Europe or North America served as the normative
standard of bourgeois revolution, discussions of passive revolution in India
carried with them the sense of a transitional system—from pre-colonial and
colonial regimes to some yet-to-be-defi ned authentic modernity.
The changes introduced since the 1990s, I believe, transformed this frame-
work of class dominance. The crucial difference now is the dismantling of the
license regime, greater entry of foreign capital and foreign consumer goods;
and the opening up of sectors such as telecommunications, transport, infra-
structure, mining, banking, insurance, and so forth, to private capital. This
has led to a change in the very composition of the capitalist class. Instead of
the earlier dominance of a few “monopoly” houses drawn from traditional
merchant backgrounds and protected by the license and import substitution
regime, there are now many more entrants into the capitalist class at all
levels and much greater mobility within its formation. Unlike the earlier fear
of foreign competition, there appears to be much greater confidence among
Indian capitalists to make use of the opportunities opened up by global flows
of capital, goods and services, including in recent times, significant exports
of capital. The most dramatic event has been the rise of the Indian informa-
tion technologies industry. But domestic manufacturing and services have
also received a major spurt, leading to annual growth rates of 8% or 9% for
the economy as a whole in the last few years.
There have been several political changes as a result. Let me list a few that
are relevant for our present discussion. First, there is a distinct ascendancy in
the relative power of the corporate capitalist class as compared to the landed
elites. The political means by which this recent dominance has been achieved
needs to be investigated more carefully because it was not achieved through
the mechanism of electoral mobilization (which used to be the source of the
political power of the landed elites). Second, the dismantling of the license
regime has opened up a new field of competition between state governments
to woo capitalist investment, both domestic and foreign. This has resulted in
the involvement of state-level political parties and leaders with the interests of
national and international corporate capital in unprecedented ways. Third,
although the state continues to be the most important mediating apparatus
in negotiating between confl icting class interests, the autonomy of the state
in relation to the dominant classes appears to have been redefi ned. Crucially,
the earlier role of the bureaucratic-managerial class, or more generally of the
urban middle classes, in leading and operating, both socially and ideologi-
cally, the autonomous interventionist activities of the developmental state has
significantly weakened. There is a strong ideological tendency among the
urban middle classes today to view the state apparatus as ridden with cor-
ruption, inefficiency and populist political venality and a much greater social
acceptance of the professionalism and commitment to growth and efficiency
of the corporate capitalist sector. The urban middle class, which once played
such a crucial role in producing and running the autonomous developmental
state of the passive revolution, appears now to have largely come under the
moral-political sway of the bourgeoisie.
It would be a mistake, however, to think that the result is a convergence of
the Indian political system with the classical models of capitalist democracy.
The critical difference, as I have pointed out elsewhere, has been produced
by a split in the field of the political between a domain of properly consti-
tuted civil society and a more ill-defi ned and contingently activated domain of
political society (Chatterjee, The Politics of the Governed 53–78). Civil society in
India today, peopled largely by the urban middle classes, is the sphere that
seeks to be congruent with the normative models of bourgeois civil society
and represents the domain of capitalist hegemony. If this were the only rele-
vant political domain, then India today would probably be indistinguishable
from other Western capitalist democracies. But there is the other domain of
what I have called political society that includes large sections of the rural
population and the urban poor. These people do, of course, have the formal
status of citizens and can exercise their franchise as an instrument of politi-
cal bargaining. But they do not relate to the organs of the state in the same
way that the middle classes do, nor do governmental agencies treat them as
proper citizens belonging to civil society. Those in political society make
their claims on government, and in turn are governed, not within the frame-
work of stable constitutionally defi ned rights and laws, but rather through
temporary, contextual and unstable arrangements arrived at through direct
political negotiations. The latter domain, which represents the vast bulk of
democratic politics in India, is not under the moral-political leadership of the
capitalist class.
Hence, my argument is that the framework of passive revolution is still valid
for India. But its structure and dynamic have undergone a change. The capi-
talist class has come to acquire a position of moral-political hegemony over
civil society, consisting principally of the urban middle classes. It exercises its
considerable influence over both the central and the state governments, not
through electoral mobilization of political parties and movements but largely
through the bureaucratic-managerial class, the increasingly influential print
and visual media, and the judiciary and other independent regulatory bod-
ies. The dominance of the capitalist class within the state structure as a whole
can be inferred from the virtual consensus among all major political parties
about the priorities of rapid economic growth led by private investment, both
domestic and foreign. It is striking that even the Communist parties have, in
practice if not in theory, joined this consensus. This means that as far as the
party system is concerned, it does not matter which particular combination
of parties comes to power in the central government, or even in most of the

states: support for rapid capitalist growth is guaranteed to continue. This is
evidence of the current success of the passive revolution.
However, the practices of the state also include the large range of govern-
mental activities in political society. Here there are locally dominant inter-
ests, such as those of landed elites, small producers and local traders who are
able to exercise political influence through their powers of electoral mobiliza-
tion. In the old understanding of the passive revolution, these interests would
have been seen as potentially opposed to those of the industrial bourgeoisie;
the confl icts would have been temporarily resolved through a compromise
worked out within the party system and the autonomous apparatus of the
state. Now, I believe, there is a new dynamic logic that ties the operations of
political society with the hegemonic role of the bourgeoisie in civil society
and its dominance over the state structure as a whole. This logic is supplied
by the requirement, explained earlier, of reversing the effects of primitive
accumulation of capital. To describe how this logic serves to integrate civil
and political society into a new structure of the passive revolution, let me
return to the subject of the peasantry.
Political Society and the Management

of Non-Corporate Capital
The integration with the market means that large sections of what was called
the subsistence economy, once the classic description of small peasant agri-
culture, have now come fully under the sway of capital. This is a key develop-
ment that must crucially affect our understanding of peasant society in India
today. There is now a degree of connectedness between peasant cultivation,
trade and credit networks in agricultural commodities, transport networks
and petty manufacturing, and services in rural markets, small towns, and
so forth, that makes it necessary for us to categorize all of them as part of a
single complex. A common description of this is the unorganized or informal
sector. Usually, a unit belonging to the informal sector is identified in terms
of the small size of the enterprise, the small number of laborers employed, or
the relatively unregulated nature of the business. In terms of the analytical
framework I have presented here, I will propose a distinction between the
formal and the informal sectors of today’s economy in terms of a difference
between corporate and non-corporate forms of capital.
My argument is that the characteristics I have described of peasant soci-
eties today are best understood as the marks of non-corporate capital. To the
extent that peasant production is deeply embedded within market structures,
investments and returns are conditioned by forces emanating from the oper-
ations of capital. In this sense, peasant production shares many connections
with informal units in manufacturing, trade and services operating in rural
markets, small towns and even, large cities. We can draw many refi ned dis-
tinctions between corporate and non-corporate forms of capital. But the key
distinction I wish to emphasize is the following. The fundamental logic that
underlies the operations of corporate capital is further accumulation of capi-
tal, usually signified by the maximization of profit. For non-corporate orga-
nizations of capital, while profit is not irrelevant, it is dominated by another
logic—that of providing the livelihood needs of those working in the units.
This difference is crucial for the understanding of the so-called informal
economy and, by extension, as I will argue, of peasant society.
Let me illustrate with a couple of familiar examples from the non-agri-
cultural informal sector and then return to the subject of peasants. Most of
us are familiar with the phenomenon of street vendors in Indian cities—they
occupy street space, usually violating municipal laws, they erect permanent
stalls, use municipal services such as water and electricity, and do not pay
taxes. To carry on their trade under these conditions, they usually organize
themselves into associations to deal with the municipal authorities, the police
and credit agencies such as banks and corporate fi rms that manufacture
and distribute the commodities they sell on the streets. These associations
are often large and the volume of business they encompass can be quite
considerable. Obviously, operating within a public and anonymous market
situation, the vendors are subject to the standard conditions of profitability
of their businesses. But to ensure that everyone is able to meet their liveli-
hood needs, the association will usually try to limit the number of vendors
who can operate in a given area and prevent the entry of newcomers. On the
other hand, there are many examples where, if the businesses are doing par-
ticularly well, the vendors do not, like corporate capitalists, continue to accu-
mulate on an expanded scale, but rather agree to extend their membership
and allow new entrants. To cite another example, in most cities and towns
of India, the transport system depends heavily on private operators who run
buses and auto-rickshaws. There is the frequent violation of regulations such
as licenses, safety standards, and pollution norms. Although most operators
own only one or two vehicles each, they form associations to negotiate with
transport authorities and the police over fares and routes, and control the
frequency of services and entry of new operators to ensure that a minimum
income, and not much more than a minimum income, is guaranteed to all.
In my book The Politics of the Governed, I have described the form of gov-
ernmental regulation of population groups such as street vendors, illegal
squatters and others, whose habitation or livelihood verge on the margins of
legality, as political society. In political society, I have argued, people are not
regarded by the state as proper citizens possessing rights and belonging to
the properly constituted civil society. Rather, they are seen to belong to par-
ticular population groups, with specific empirically established and statisti-
cally described characteristics, which are targets of particular governmental
policies. Since dealing with many of these groups implies the tacit acknowl-
edgement of various illegal practices, governmental agencies will often treat
such cases as exceptions, justified by very specific and special circumstances,

so that the structure of general rules and principles is not compromised.
Thus, illegal squatters may be given water supply or electricity connections
but on exceptional grounds so as not to club them with regular customers
having secure legal title to their property, or street vendors may be allowed
to trade under specific conditions that distinguish them from regular shops
and businesses who comply with the laws and pay taxes. All of this makes the
claims of people in political society a matter of constant political negotiation
and the results are never secure or permanent. Their entitlements, even when
recognized, never quite become rights.
To connect the question of political society with my earlier discussion on
the process of primitive accumulation of capital, I now wish to advance the
following proposition. Civil society is where corporate capital is hegemonic,
whereas political society is the space of management of non-corporate capi-
tal. I have argued that since the 1990s, corporate capital, and along with it
the class of corporate capitalists, have achieved a hegemonic position over
civil society in India. This means that the logic of accumulation, expressed
at this time in the demand that national economic growth be maintained
at a very high rate and that the requirements of corporate capital be given
priority, holds sway over civil society—that is to say, over the urban middle
classes. It also means that the educational, professional, and social aspira-
tions of the middle classes have become tied with the fortunes of corporate
capital. There is now a powerful tendency to insist on the legal rights of
proper citizens, to impose civic order in public places and institutions and
to treat the messy world of the informal sector and political society with a
degree of intolerance. A vague but powerful feeling seems to prevail among
the urban middle classes that rapid growth will solve all problems of poverty
and unequal opportunities.
The informal sector, which does not have a corporate structure and does
not function principally according to the logic of accumulation, does not,
however, lack organization. As I have indicated in my examples, those who
function in the informal sector often have large, and in many cases quite pow-
erful and effective, organizations. They need to organize precisely to function
in the modern market and governmental spaces. Traditional organizations
of peasant and artisan societies are not adequate for the task. I believe this
organization is as much of a political activity as it is an economic one. Given
the logic of non-corporate capital that I have described, the function of these
organizations is to successfully operate within the rules of the market and of
governmental regulations in order to ensure the livelihood needs of its mem-
bers. Most of those who provide leadership in organizing people, both own-
ers and workers, operating in the informal sector are actually or potentially
political leaders. Thus, it is not incorrect to say that the management of non-
corporate capital under such conditions is a political function that is carried
out by political leaders. The existence and survival of the vast assemblage of
so-called informal units of production in India today, including peasant pro-

duction, is directly dependent on the successful operation of certain political
functions. That is what is facilitated by the process of democracy.
The organizations that can carry out these political functions have to be
innovative—neither the history of the cooperative movement nor that of social-
ist collective organization provides any model that can be copied by these
non-corporate organizations of capital in India. What is noticeable here is a
strong sense of attachment to small-scale private property and, at the same
time, a willingness to organize and cooperate in order to protect the fragile
basis of livelihood that is constantly under threat from the advancing forces
of corporate capital. However, it appears that these organizations of non-cor-
porate capital are stronger, at least at this time, in the non-agricultural infor-
mal sectors in cities and towns and less so among the rural peasantry. This
means that while the organization of non-corporate capital in urban areas
has developed relatively stable and effective forms and is able, by mobilizing
governmental support through the activities of political society, to sustain
the livelihood needs of the urban poor in the informal sector, the rural poor,
consisting of small peasants and rural laborers, are still dependent on direct
governmental support for their basic needs and are less able to make effec-
tive organized use of the market in agricultural commodities. This challenge
lies at the heart of the recent controversies over “farmer suicides” as well as
the ongoing debates over acquisition of agricultural land for industry. It is
clear that the sector of agricultural production will face rapid changes in the
near future and Indian democracy will have to invent new forms of organiza-
tion to ensure the survival of a vast rural population.
Peasant Culture and Politics

I have mentioned before that state agencies, or governmental agencies gen-
erally, including NGOs that carry out governmental functions, are no lon-
ger an external entity in relation to peasant society. This has had several
implications. First, because various welfare and developmental functions are
now widely recognized to be necessary tasks for government in relation to
the poor, which includes large sections of peasants, these fields of health,
education, basic inputs for agricultural production and the provision of basic
necessities of life are now demanded from governmental agencies as a matter
of legitimate claims by peasants. This means that government officials and
political representatives in rural areas are constantly besieged by demands
for various welfare and developmental benefits. It also means that peasants
learn to operate the levers of the governmental system, to apply pressure
at the right places or negotiate for better terms. This is where the everyday
operations of democratic politics, organization, and leadership come into
play. Second, the response of governmental agencies to such demands is
usually flexible, based on calculations of costs and returns. In most cases,
the strategy is to break up the benefit-seekers into smaller groups, defi ned by
specific demographic or social characteristics, so that there can be a flexible
policy that does not regard the entire rural population as a single homoge-
neous mass. The intention is precisely to fragment the benefit seekers and
hence divide the potential opposition to the state. One of the most remark-
able features of the recent agitations in India over the acquisition of land
for industry is that despite the continued use of the old rhetoric of peasant
solidarity, there are clearly significant sections of people in these villages
that do not join these agitations because they feel they stand to gain from
the government policy. Third, this field of negotiations opened up by flexible
policies of seeking and delivering benefits creates a new competitive spirit
among benefit-seekers. Since peasants now confront, not landlords or trad-
ers as direct exploiters, but rather governmental agencies from whom they
expect benefits, the state is blamed for perceived inequalities in the distribu-
tion of benefits. Thus, peasants will accuse officials and political representa-
tives of favoring cities at the cost of the countryside. Sections of peasants will
complain of being deprived while those from other regions, ethnic groups,
or political loyalties are allegedly favored. The charge against state agencies
is not one of exploitation but discrimination. This gives a completely new
quality to peasant politics, one that is completely missing in the classical
understandings of peasant society.
Fourth, unlike the old forms of peasant insurgency that characterized
much of the history of peasant society for centuries, there is, I believe, a quite
different quality in the role of violence in contemporary peasant politics.
While subaltern peasant revolts of the old kind had their own notions of
strategy and tactics, they were characterized, as Ranajit Guha showed in his
classic work, by strong community solidarity on the one side and negative
opposition to the perceived exploiters on the other. Today, the use of violence
in peasant agitations seems to have a far more calculative, almost utilitarian
logic, designed to draw attention to specific grievances with a view to seeking
appropriate governmental benefits. A range of deliberate tactics is followed
to elicit the right responses from officials, political leaders, and especially the
media. This is probably the most significant change in the nature of peasant
politics in the last two or three decades.
As far as peasant agriculture is concerned, however, things are much less
clearly developed. Small peasant agriculture, even though it is thoroughly
enmeshed in market connections, also feels threatened by the market. There
is, in particular, an unfamiliarity with, and deep suspicion of, corporate orga-
nizations. Peasants appear to be far less able to deal with the uncertainties of
the market than they are able to secure governmental benefits. In the last few
years, there have been hundreds of reported suicides of peasants who sud-
denly fell into huge debts because they were unable to realize the expected
price from their agricultural products, such as tobacco and cotton. Peas-
ants feel that the markets for these commercial crops are manipulated by
large mysterious forces that are entirely beyond their control. Unlike many
organizations in the informal non-agricultural sector in urban areas that can
effectively deal with corporate fi rms for the supply of inputs or the sale of
their products, peasants have been unable thus far to build similar organiza-
tions. This is the large area of the management of peasant agriculture, not as
subsistence production for self-consumption, but as the field of non-corporate
capital, that remains a challenge.
It is important to emphasize that contrary to what is suggested by
the depoliticized idea of governmentality, the quality of politics in the
domain of political society is by no means a mechanical transaction of
benefits and services. Even as state agencies try by constantly adjusting
their flexible policies to break up large combinations of claimants, the
organization of demands in political society can adopt highly emotive
resources of solidarity and militant action. Democratic politics in India
is daily marked by passionate and often violent agitations to protest dis-
crimination and to secure claims. The fact that the objectives of such
agitations are framed by the conditions of governmentality is no reason to
think that they cannot arouse considerable passion and affective energy.
Collective actions in political society cannot be depoliticized by framing
them within the grid of governmentality because the activities of govern-
mentality affect the very conditions of livelihood and social existence of
the groups they target.
Interestingly, even though the claims made by different groups in politi-
cal society are for governmental benefits, these cannot often be met by the
standard application of rules and frequently require the declaration of an
exception. Thus, when a group of people living or cultivating on illegally
occupied land, or selling goods on the street claim the right to continue
with their activities, or demand compensation for moving somewhere else,
they are in fact inviting the state to declare their case as an exception to the
universally applicable rule. They do not demand that the right to private
property in land be abolished or that the regulations on trade licenses and
sales taxes be set aside. When the state acknowledges these demands, it too
must do so not by the simple application of administrative rules but rather
by a political decision to declare an exception. The governmental response
to demands in political society is also, therefore, irreducibly political rather
than merely administrative.
I must point out one other significant characteristic of the modalities of
democratic practice in political society. This has to do with the relevance of
numbers. Ever since Tocqueville in the early nineteenth century, it is a com-
mon argument that electoral democracies foster the tyranny of the majority.
However, mobilizations in political society are often premised on the strate-
gic manipulation of relative electoral strengths rather than on the expecta-
tion of commanding a majority. Indeed, the frequently spectacular quality
of actions in political society, including the resort to violence, is a sign of the
ability of relatively small groups of people to make their voices heard and to
register their claims with governmental agencies. As a matter of fact, it could
even be said that the activities of political society represent a continuing cri-
tique of the paradoxical reality in all capitalist democracies of equal citizen-
ship and majority rule, on the one hand, and the dominance of property and
privilege, on the other.
But the underside of political society is the utter marginalization of
those groups who do not even have the strategic leverage of electoral
mobilization. In every region of India, there exist marginal groups of peo-
ple who are unable to gain access to the mechanisms of political society.
They are often marked by their exclusion from peasant society, such as
low-caste groups who do not participate in agriculture or tribal peoples
who depend more on forest products or pastoral occupations than on agri-
culture. Political society and electoral democracy have not given these
groups the means to make effective claims on governmentality. In this
sense, these marginalized groups represent an outside beyond the bound-
aries of political society.
The important difference represented by activities in political society
when compared to the movements of democratic mobilization familiar
to us from the twentieth century is its lack of a perspective of transition.
While there is much passion aroused over ending the discriminations of
caste or ethnicity or asserting the rightful claims of marginal groups, there
is little conscious effort to view these agitations as directed toward a fun-
damental transformation of the structures of political power, as they were
in the days of nationalist and socialist mobilizations. On the contrary, if
anything, it is the bourgeoisie, hegemonic in civil society and dominant
within the state structure as a whole, which appears to have a narrative
of transition—from stagnation to rapid growth, from backwardness and
poverty to modernity and prosperity, from Third World insignificance to
major world-power status. Perhaps this is not surprising if one remembers
the class formation of the passive revolution: with the landed elites pushed
to a subordinate position and the bureaucratic-managerial class won over
by the bourgeoisie, it is the capitalist class that has now acquired a position
to set the terms to which other political formations can only respond.
The unity of the state system as a whole is now maintained by relating
civil society to political society through the logic of reversal of the effects of
primitive accumulation. Once this logic is recognized by the bourgeoisie as
a necessary political condition for the continued rapid growth of corporate
capital, the state, with its mechanisms of electoral democracy, becomes the
field for the political negotiation of demands for the transfer of resources,
through fiscal and other means, from the accumulation economy to govern-
mental programs aimed at providing the livelihood needs of the poor and
the marginalized. The autonomy of the state, and that of the bureaucracy,
now lies in their power to adjudicate the quantum and form of transfer of
resources to the so-called “social sector of expenditure.” Ideological differ-

ences, such as those between the right and the left, for instance, are largely
about the amount and modalities of social sector expenditure, such as pov-
erty removal programs. These differences do not question the dynamic logic
that binds civil society to political society under the dominance of capital.
Let me conclude by pointing out once more that this analysis of post-
colonial capitalist development in the twenty-fi rst century has been greatly
enabled by the analytical insights given to us by Antonio Gramsci, writ-
ing against the historical background of backward capitalism in Italy in the
early twentieth century. It is a measure of the power of his thought that it
still provides the resources for scholars in the postcolonial world today to
understand their rapidly transforming world. Perhaps it is also significant
that these scholars have taken seriously Gramsci’s advice that there is no
merit in blindly asserting an “optimism of the will” without fi rst coming to
grips with the lessons offered by a pessimistic intellect. The present dynamics
of the passive revolution make it extremely difficult to propose credible coun-
ter-hegemonic strategies. Yet, even if a perspective of transition is unavail-
able, our analysis using Gramscian concepts makes us aware of the many
spaces within postcolonial capitalist democracy that have not come under
the hegemony of corporate capital and, given the present form of the passive
revolution, are unlikely to do so. Those are the spaces that remain open for
bold and innovative counter-hegemonic strategies.
I also suggest that the distinction between corporate and non-corporate
capital appears to be coinciding with the divide between civil society and
political society. Once again following Gramsci, who himself experienced
and fought against the rise of fascism, we can anticipate some ominous con-
sequences. We have seen in several Asian countries what may be called a
revolt of “proper citizens” against the unruliness and corruption of systems
of popular political representation. In Thailand in 2006, there was an army-
led coup that ousted a popularly elected government. The action seemed to
draw support from the urban middle classes who expressed their disapproval
of what they considered wasteful and corrupt populist expenditure aimed at
gaining the support of the rural population. The following year, there was
a similar army-backed coup in Bangladesh where plans for parliamentary
elections were indefi nitely postponed while an interim government took
emergency measures to clean the system of supposedly “corrupt” politicians.
Reports suggest that that move was initially welcomed by the urban middle
classes. In India, a significant feature in recent years has been the withdrawal
of the urban middle classes from political activities altogether: there is wide-
spread resentment in the cities of the populism and corruption of all political
parties that, it is said, are driven principally by the motive of gaining votes
at the cost of ensuring the conditions of rapid economic growth. There is no
doubt that this reflects the hegemony of the logic of corporate capital among
the urban middle classes. The fact, however, is that the bulk of the popula-
tion in India lives outside the orderly zones of proper civil society. It is in
political society that they have to be fed and clothed and given work, if only
to ensure the long-term and relatively peaceful well-being of civil society.
That is the dilemma of political management on which the future of the pas-
sive revolution under conditions of democracy depends. We hope we have
better intellectual and political resources today to fight the forces of reaction
than we did during the life of Antonio Gramsci.
Notes
1. See Sanyal.
2. See Bardhan.
3. See Kaviraj, “A Critique of Passive Revolution” 2429–44.
7 Entering the World from
an Oblique Angle
On Jia Zhangke as an
Organic Intellectual
Pheng Cheah
Antonio Gramsci’s concept of the organic intellectual is an important ana-

lytical category for understanding the political vocation of revolutionary
thinkers and writers from the colonial and postcolonial peripheries since the
period of decolonization to the present. As a member of that stratum of a
social group that expresses and gives it homogeneity and self-consciousness
about its own vocation, the organic intellectual of a revolutionary social
group has a fundamental role in reaching out to the mass members of the
group to aid them in articulating and organizing their feelings and experi-
ences with the aim of cultivating a revolutionary consciousness. Gramsci’s
concept communicates directly with the thought of postcolonial intellectuals
and cultural workers such as Ayi Kwei Armah (Ghana), Ngugi wa Thiong’o
(Kenya), Frantz Fanon (Martinique/Algeria) and Amilcar Cabral (Guinea-
Bissau). The following comment by Armah is representative.
The question of any individual African, Afro-American, Afro-Carib-

bean or any other kind of African-related intellectual is whether to de-
cide to go along with this useless and destructive parasitical bourgeois
élite or to rack our brains to fi nd a way to be useful not to the system
that oppresses our people but to our people themselves . . . To Fanon,
culture meant only one thing, an environment shaped to help us and
our children grow—shaped by ourselves in action against the system that
enslaves us. (Armah 41–42)1
However, the continuing pertinence of the concept of the organic intel-

lectual for analyzing progressive political struggles in the peripheries of the
contemporary world system can be questioned on two grounds. First, the
organic intellectual’s task of organizing his or her social group within the
specific context of the historical development of its cultural resources and
values indicates that this organizational function is geographically limited,
exercised over a territorially bound social space, the civil society of a nation-
state. Yet, the borders of this social space are gradually being undermined
138 Pheng Cheah
by globalization. Second, the emphasis on counter-hegemonic struggle for
radical social change presupposes the telos of a socialist revolution that may
no longer be plausible in today’s post-socialist world. This chapter attempts
a critical examination of the limits of Gramsci’s concept by considering the
case of Jia Zhangke (賈樟柯), the renowned fi lmmaker from the People’s
Republic of China (PRC). Throughout his career, Jia has been concerned
with portraying the negative impact of capitalist globalization on local popu-
lations in China. In their focus on the material transformations of China’s
urban and provincial landscape as a result of its accelerated integration into
the global capitalist system, Jia’s recent fi lms are celluloid interpretations of
the ruined landscape of rapidly globalizing China and the plight of its masses
in the same way that Charles Dickens’ Hard Times or Elizabeth Gaskell’s
novels are novels of the English Industrial Revolution. Jia is an especially
interesting test case for evaluating the concept of the organic intellectual
because the PRC, one of the few remaining socialist states in the world, is
often considered by world systems theorists as a critical site for examining
whether there are alternatives to the social formations of capitalist market
economies.2 An organic intellectual of the masses would attempt to arrest the
slide of Chinese society into a post-socialist market system, to divert China
from being transformed in the image of neoliberal capitalism by returning
Chinese society back to critical elements from its socialist past so that its
political economy and society remains that of market socialism. But if this
critical task turns out to be implausible or even impossible, then the voca-
tion and function of the radical organic intellectual is no longer viable in the
contemporary world, which is thereby inevitably post-socialist.
The Organic Intellectual: Organization, the Vitality of

the Social Organism and the Circle of Organic Form
The important function that Gramsci accords to the organic intellectual in
counter-hegemonic struggles can only be adequately understood through the
semantic, conceptual and metaphorical connections between the adjective,
“organic,” the activity of organization, and the modern philosophical under-
standing of the organism as an organized and self-organizing system of means
and ends. Gramsci’s definition of the organic intellectual begins as follows:
Every social group, coming into existence on the original terrain of an

essential function in the world of economic production, creates together
with itself, organically, one or more strata of intellectuals which give it
homogeneity and an awareness of its own function not only in the eco-
nomic but also in the social and political fields. (SPNB 5)
The genesis of organic intellectuals occurs according to laws of functional devel-

opment. In the first place, a social group comes into being in correspondence
Entering the World from an Oblique Angle 139
with a function of economic production. Second, that social group’s genesis
requires an almost equiprimordial generation of intellectuals who fulfill the spe-
cific function of thematizing and presenting the function of that social group to
itself, thereby enabling the group to recognize itself and its function in different
fields. The word, organic, has two related meanings. It refers to the fact that the
genesis of the intellectual strata in question is autochthonous, that is, grows out
of or is generated by the social group from within itself. But it also points to the
fact that such intellectuals are able to give to the social group its proper organic
form, or more precisely, to complete this form. This organic form is both a final
and a formal cause.3 It gives to the social group an awareness of its ends or aims,
the “for-the-sake-of-which” the social group came into being in the first place.
But such ends are also ideational forms that arrange the masses into relations
with each other such that they are members of a social group, thereby shaping
the social group by giving it its form. Hence, the organic form is also a techni-
cal power of organization, which Gramsci regards as synonymous with human
intellectual activity.4
This power of organization is not the unique preserve of those who have
the socially designated function of intellectuals. 5 It is already operative in the
economic sphere in the person of the capitalist entrepreneur, who
himself represents a higher level of social elaboration, already character-

ised by a certain directive [dirigente] and technical (i.e. intellectual) ca-
pacity: he must have a certain technical capacity, not only in the limited
sphere of his activity and initiative but in other spheres as well, at least in
those which are closest to economic production. He must be an organizer
of masses of men; he must be an organizer of the “confidence” of investors
in his business, of the customers for his product, etc. (SPNB 5)
Gramsci’s emphasis on organization radically modifies the conventional eco-

nomic determinism of Marxist theory on two related levels. At the systemic
level, the development of social forms is no longer understood in terms of a
rigid base-superstructure model. At the level of individual human behavior,
the fundamental human activity of work is now expanded to include intel-
lectual processes.
With regard to the development of social forms, Gramsci emphasizes the
importance of organization in the economic sphere and all other adjacent
spheres. The process of organization concerns the sum total of technical or
means–ends causal relations that concern society. To organize is to estab-
lish and regulate relations between various social classes, what Marx called
the “reproduction” of social relations. Gramsci emphasizes the link between
organization and the social and political organism.
If not all entrepreneurs, at least an élite amongst them must have the ca-
pacity to be an organiser of society in general, including all its complex
140 Pheng Cheah
organism of services, right up to the state organism, because of the
need to create the conditions most favourable to the expansion of their
own class; or at least they must possess the capacity to choose the
deputies (specialised employees) to whom to entrust this activity of
organising the general system of relationships external to the business
itself. (SPNB 5–6)
The elaboration of organic intellectuals is a second-order process that fol-

lows on the elaboration of the new social class that is assuming hegemony.
On the one hand, then, the various organic intellectuals of the capitalist
bourgeoisie—Gramsci mentions “the industrial technician, the specialist

in political economy, the organisers of a new culture, of a new legal sys-
tem” (SPNB 5)—are epiphenomena or reflections of the entrepreneur, his
deputies, or delegates. On the other hand, however, precisely because the
organic intellectual is a specialization of activities of the new social type
that were only previously present in an unelaborated, embryonic form,
he is also a crystallization of these fundamental activities and brings out
their defi ning character in the sharpest relief. This means that cultural-
intellectual work is not a mere reflection of the economic infrastructure
from which it is elaborated. It has a causal capacity to change society
precisely because like economic activity, it is also a form of organization.
Indeed, insofar as it is the crystallization of the capacity for organization
into specialized functions, intellectual work is even a necessary condition
for maintaining economic activity.
The organizational connections between organic intellectuals, their social
class and economic production are therefore organic in a third sense: they
are functions of society conceived in analogy with the causality of an organ-
ism or a self-organized being.6 It may initially have seemed that the entrepre-
neur qua representative of the capitalist class is the agent of organizational
activity. But it becomes clear that the social organism is also an “agent.”
The entrepreneur has the capacity to be an organizer only because he is an
elaboration of the social organism and, hence, part of society’s process of epi-
genesis. The same reasoning applies to the organic intellectual. He is also an
agent at the same time that he is an elaboration of larger social forces. Hence,
far from characterizing a form of existence that is static, pre-given or innate,
the “organic” refers instead to a dynamic process of the inner-directed devel-
opment of a bounded whole, one that is connected to its members in relations
of complete reciprocity and mutual feedback such that both the members
and the social whole are means and ends of each other, where members
and whole are equally active and possess agency. Such a whole would be an
integrated totality.
Herein resides the organic intellectual’s fundamental causal power in the
development of society: society requires and, indeed, is nothing other than
the process of organization. The intellectual is the organizer in its purest
shape, the meta-organizer who completes the organic form of a society at a
given historical conjuncture because he articulates the ends of the hegemonic
social class as ideal and formal causes. Put another way, organization is the
constitutive process of social elaboration and one of the products of this elab-
oration is the organic intellectual who personifies the organizational activity
of a given social class. The organic intellectual is of paramount importance
in creating the web of relations that makes society functional according to
the ends of his social group. More specifically, organic intellectuals of the
hegemonic social class consciously complete the self-organization of society
by creating and maintaining social relations in the image of their class.
Gramsci’s distinction between traditional and organic intellectuals should
also be understood according to this organismic schema. Traditional intellec-

tuals refer to intellectuals that seem to transcend the historical development
of social and political forms. They do not subsist in an organismic feedback
relation with social groups because they are professional intellectuals who pre-
date the emergence of the hegemonic social group and present themselves as
independent of the latter.7 However, this autonomy from political struggles
is false because all traditional intellectual strata were elaborated from hege-
monic social groups in prior historical periods and their self-understanding as
transcending political struggles can have important political consequences.
I have been discussing the important role given to organic intellectuals at
the systemic level of the development of society. Since their function involves
giving direction to their social group at the level of collective consciousness
through the thematization of ends in intelligible forms, the elaboration of
organic intellectuals from within their social group requires the cultivation
and transformation of their consciousnesses at the individual level. Gram-
sci’s philosophical anthropology is informed by a similar organismic schema.
His expansion of intellectual activity to include all socially related technical
relations follows directly from his philosophical account of human nature
where the conventional distinction between thought or intellection and mate-
rial labor is rejected. For Gramsci, all human practical activity entails both
intellectual and muscular-nervous effort because it involves a creative rela-
tion between the self and the world and thus requires an intellectual concep-
tion of the world even if this conception is not explicitly thematized (SPNB
9). Although practical activity continually changes the physical and social
world, it can only bring about a long-lasting transformation of the world if
it is combined with a carefully articulated conception of the world. This is
Gramsci’s version of the unity of theory and practice envisioned by the early
Marx when he wrote in his Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right that
[T]heory also becomes a material force [Gewalt] once it has gripped

[ergreift] the masses. Theory is capable of gripping the masses when it
demonstrates ad hominem, and it demonstrates ad hominem as soon as it
becomes radical. To be radical is to grasp [ fassen] things by the root. But
for man the root is man himself. (Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of
Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. Introduction, 251) 8
142 Pheng Cheah
Marx is alluding to the derivation of the verb, begreifen, to grasp or to
comprehend, and the noun, Begriff (concept), from the physical action of
grabbing or seizing something (greifen). Concepts are both the means by
which we handle things but they can take hold of us and move (ergreifen) and
change us. One uses a concept as a tool or mediating term to get a grasp on
a thing but to understand something through concepts is also to be taken
hold of by them, to let them guide one in one’s relation to things. Gramsci’s
reinscription of Marx emphasizes that the power of intellectual concepts to
grasp us is also physiological. The world picture that concepts articulate can
physically change the bodies of individuals by stimulating the intellectual
activity already present in everyone so as to bring about a new equilibrium

in the relation between intellectual activity and muscular activity (SPNB
9). This gripping of everyone by intellectual conceptions does not involve
subordinating material activity to ideas. 9 Conceptions of the world need to
be actualized and must therefore be rooted in or united with material action.
An actualizable conception is one that acknowledges the primacy of material
processes. It is a matter of incorporating or incarnating the new conception
of the world in the efforts and activities, both intellectual and physical, of the
masses. This process has two moments. First, the new stratum of intellectuals
is produced or created by an elaboration in which intellectual activity found
in everyday life is focused and specialized. Second, the new intellectual stra-
tum then attempts to bring about changes in society as a whole. Now, it is
unclear whether the power of the new intellectual stratum consists merely in
organizing the efforts of the masses to create a new world by giving them
direction or whether the change is more radical and occurs at the physiologi-
cal level—that is, altering the equilibrium between material and intellectual
activity. This lack of clear distinction between the different levels of social
change (giving direction to the masses and changing their bodies) is due to
the fact that the processes that constitute any organism always bleed into
each other in a relation of feedback.
An aesthetically pleasing analogy between organization at the levels of
the society and the individual body lies at the heart of Gramsci’s account of
the organic intellectual. Just as the individual in daily practical activity orga-
nizes his muscular-nervous effort through the positing of ends, the actions
of masses are organized by the intellectual stratum through conceptions of
the world that give mass activity direction. But since organic intellectuals are
themselves elaborated from social forces and must be rooted in the political
struggles of their class, they cannot be said to impose extraneous ideas onto
practical activity. This is because practical activity that seeks to create a
world involves organization and the organic intellectual is merely the person-
ification of organizational activity. In his relation to the general members of
his class, the organic intellectual personifies the unity of theory and practice
because he embodies the organizational power of intellectual activity that is
united with practical activity. In Gramsci’s words,
[T]he mode of being of the new intellectual . . . [consists] in active par-
ticipation in practical life, as constructor, organizer, “permanent per-
suader” and not just a simple orator . . . from technique-as-work one
proceeds to technique-as-science and to the humanistic conception of
history, without which one remains “specialised” and does not become
“directive” (specialized and political). (SPNB 10)
The organic intellectual is the completion of the social organism. The social
organism is a fluid whole that maintains an internal fluidity in its constituent
processes despite the determinateness of its proper contours. The organic intel-
lectual enables the social organism to be a whole in its very fluidity because
he facilitates the organism’s return to itself, thereby completing the form of the
social organism as a self-organizing being. This power of completion is vested
in an intelligible form, the conception of the world the intellectual articulates,
where technical knowledge (techne) directs practical activity and becomes
political. The geometrical figure, or concept-metaphor, for this completion of
the social organism qua power of self-return is the closure of a circle. This
figure governs all of Gramsci’s analyses and concrete prescriptions concerning
the health, vigor, and power of a social class seeking dominance and the gen-
eration of organic intellectuals as the stratum that completes the dominance of
its class through the securing of social hegemony.
For reasons of economy, I only mention four of the more important examples
of this figure of the circle. First, Gramsci argues that a social group seeking
dominance must assimilate traditional intellectuals by winning them over at the
level of ideology. But this appropriation, a process of ingestion that pulls what is
external or foreign into the circle—that is, an act of organization that remakes
the foreign in the image of the organism’s proper form—“is made quicker and
more efficacious the more the group in question succeeds in simultaneously
elaborating its own organic intellectuals” (SPNB 10). Second, the organic qual-
ity of intellectuals is figured in terms of the role they play in completing the cir-
cle of their social group’s exercise of power. This power is exercised through two
main superstructures, the state and civil society, which correspond to the func-
tions of domination and hegemony respectively. These functions are, Gramsci
emphasizes, “precisely organisational and connective” (SPNB 12; emphasis added).
Intellectuals are functionaries in the complex mediations between these super-
structures and the world of production. In performing this connecting task, they
“are the dominant group’s ‘deputies’ exercising the subaltern functions of social
hegemony and political government” (SPNB 12).
Third, the function of the political party in elaborating various types
of organic intellectuals such as political intellectuals and leaders in both
civil society and political life is another process of maintaining the circle
through the establishment of connections within civil society. This is seen
most clearly in the political party’s secondary function of “welding together the
organic intellectuals of a given group—the dominant one—and the traditional
144 Pheng Cheah
intellectuals” (SPNB 15; emphasis added). Fourth, the analytical distinction
between organic and traditional intellectuals is essentially one between a self-
completing circle and a broken circle where the capacity for self-return has
been obstructed because of the traditional intellectual’s lack of connection to
the masses. This is the most important circle in Gramsci’s writings because
it concerns the unity of theory and practice, now refigured as the need for a
more elementary unity between knowing and feeling, attitudes that Gramsci
initially attributes to the intellectual strata and the masses, respectively.
The popular element “feels” but does not always know or understand;
the intellectual element “knows” but does not always understand and in
particular does not always feel . . . The intellectual can be an intellectual
(and not a pure pedant) if distinct and separate from the people-nation,
that is, without feeling the elementary passions of the people, under-
standing them and therefore explaining and justifying them in the par-
ticular historical situation and connecting them dialectically to the laws
of history and to a superior conception of the world, scientifically and
coherently elaborated . . . One cannot make politics-history . . . without
this sentimental connection between intellectuals and people-nation. In
the absence of such a nexus the relations between the intellectual and
the people-nation . . . are reduced to relationships of a purely bureau-
cratic and formal order; the intellectuals become a caste, or a priesthood
(so-called organic centralism). (SPNB 418)
Elsewhere, Gramsci defi nes the organic centralism of traditional intellectuals

as a form of fetishization of the collective organism in which the social organ-
ism becomes autonomized from the decisions, actions and lives of its individ-
ual members and gains a (phantasmatic) life of its own in relation to which
individuals are passive and helpless (SPNB 187 fn 83). In contradistinction,
the unity of feeling and knowledge achieved by the contact between the
organic intellectual and the masses will generate true social organic life that
constitutes a revolutionary social force (SPNB 418). While Gramsci acknowl-
edges that it is inevitable that “a gap” can develop between intellectuals and
masses since the self-organization of a mass requires that there be intellectu-
als (organizers and leaders) who specialize in the conceptual and philosophi-
cal elaboration of ideas, this gap can always be bridged through a dialectical
reciprocity between the intellectuals and the masses (SPNB 334–35). This
give and take (“exchange”) completes the circle of the social organism and
gives it the vigor of a social force with world-historical power.
Globalization and the Breaching of the Circle:

Jia Zhangke’s Dilemmas
The immediate attractiveness of Gramsci’s account of the organic intellec-
tual for understanding the struggles of colonized peoples as well as popular
struggles for freedom and justice in postcolonial space lies in his extension
of intellectual activity to include the technical organization and direction
of material practical activity, his focus on the need to establish reciprocal
connections between the masses and intellectuals for an economically and
politically ascendant class, and his study of the relationship between the
peasant masses and intellectual organization in the Italian case. Of special
significance here is the fact that Gramsci also describes the masses—the mate-
rial basis of the revolutionary historical subject—as “the people-nation.” This
implies that the organic intellectual who seeks to connect with the masses
becomes rooted in the proper body of the people-nation and that the social
organism he completes is national. In contradistinction, traditional intel-

lectuals are characterized as rootless and cosmopolitan, not least because
they appear separated from the dominant class.10 The national character of
Gramsci’s political thought is consonant with the general trend of political
organicism in modern European philosophy, especially German idealism,
which, as I have argued elsewhere, characterized the political body as the
incarnation of freedom, understood in analogy with a living organic totality
because the organism’s causality was seen as analogous with the causality of
freedom, in terms of the bounded community of a people defi ned in terms of
language (Fichte) or of the constitutionally organized territorial state (Hegel;
see Cheah, Spectral Nationality Chs. 3–4). As a result of Marxist theoretical
influences, political organicism is the unspoken philosophical basis of revo-
lutionary decolonization. Accordingly, there are strong resonances between
Gramsci’s thought and the situation of decolonizing nations with large peas-
ant populations and an emerging indigenous bourgeoisie seeking to wrest
political power from the colonial state. This explains why the fi rst generation
of the subaltern studies historians of South Asia have taken Gramsci’s ideas
about the passive revolution and the relation between dominance and hege-
mony as points of departure in their studies of the limits of Indian bourgeois
nationalist politics in the colonial era and the failings of the postcolonial
state.11 The issue I want to address is whether the organic intellectual in our
era of globalization can successfully fulfi ll his function of completing the
circle of the social organism. And if he cannot, what implications does this
have for accounts of the power of intellectual form in struggles for freedom,
of which Gramsci’s theory of the organic intellectual is exemplary?
Gramsci’s account of the organic intellectual is deeply marked by a mes-
meric fascination with the capacity of technological mediation in the modern
capitalist era. He endowed technical knowledge with the power to complete
the circle of the social organism because for Gramsci as it was for the Marx
of the Grundrisse and thereafter, technology promised to be the basis of the
unity of theory and practice since in it, scientific knowledge had become a
direct efficient cause and a material force. The power of intellectual form qua
conception of the world to organize and give direction to the masses is merely
an elaboration of technique-as-science. Hence, “in the modern world, techni-
cal education, closely bound to industrial labor even at the most primitive
146 Pheng Cheah
and unqualified level, must form the basis of the new type of intellectual”
(SPNB 9). In this regard, the fi lmic image is an exemplary intellectual form
both because it gives a visual image of the world and also because this image
is the product of ongoing technological innovations. I approach Jia Zhangke’s
fi lms from this perspective.
But fi rst, a few words to frame this displacement of Gramsci in postco-
lonial space to Gramsci in post-socialist China. Gramsci’s account of hege-
mony is of great interest to the leading New Left Chinese intellectual, Wang
Hui, in his attempt to formulate a new socialist vision for China in the wake
of the marketization of the PRC economy as a result of its entry into the
global capitalist world system (Wang Hui 683 –700).12 In this context, the
organic intellectual’s task is to contest the hegemony of a bureaucratized
communist state that has become increasingly depoliticized as a result of its
amenability to global capitalist market imperatives. Such depoliticization,
Wang suggests, has transformed the PRC into a heteronomous body. To
counteract this depoliticization, a radically politicized popular vision of civil
society that retains socialist ideals is required. Insofar as Gramsci’s thought
is premised on the horizon of the realization of a communist society, the task
of the organic intellectual would now need to be re-conceptualized in terms
of a selective and critical inheritance and reincarnation of socialist ideals
that are viable in a post-socialist age instead of a dogmatic return to ortho-
dox forms of state socialism as exemplified by the PRC state. Rather than a
revival of already achieved forms of communism that have been rendered
effete in contemporary globalization, what needs to be envisioned is a form
of socialism that is a viable social, political and economic alternative today
for those sections of the Chinese population that have been marginalized by
post-socialist market economic development and its political administration.
These sections of the population are largely rural or provincial, including
a large floating population of migrant workers who moved to large cities in
search of work and economic prosperity. Hence, what needs to be envisioned
is a neo-socialism in a post-socialist world, so to speak, that can take root in
this part of the Chinese population. Furthermore, as Wang rightly observes,
in an age of globalization where the legitimacy of the PRC state is secured by
its acquiescence to and active accommodation of global or transnational cap-
italist market relations, counter-hegemonic struggles cannot remain merely
national or international in scope but must also have a global focus to match
the capitalist market system.
The articulation of a conception of the world through which the masses
of the PRC can map the PRC’s place in the global capitalist system and rec-
ognize the impact of these global market forces on the culture and social life
of the urban and rural population and on their daily existence is a crucial
aspect of counter-hegemonic work. This project of articulation is consonant
with the task of forging and developing a national-popular collective will
through culture that Gramsci attributed to the Jacobin forces in the case of
the French Revolution, although it cannot carry the same radical revolution-
ary charge of overthrowing a political regime. In Gramsci’s words,
The positive conditions are to be sought in the existence of urban social

groups which have attained an adequate development in the field of
industrial production and a certain level of historico-political culture.
Any formation of a national-popular collective will is impossible, unless
the great mass of peasant farmers bursts simultaneously into political life.
(SPNB 131–32)
Jia Zhangke intends his fi lms to be a medium for a similar mode of self-
recognition for the masses that we may characterize as organic. If we are to
give credence to his comments about the subject-matter and documentary-
realist style of his fi lms, they are meant to be celluloid archives of popular
Chinese consciousness and its historical memories in the period of massive
social upheaval from the beginning of the economic modernization of China
to the post-socialist present. Commenting on his focus on the lives of young
people from provincial China (Fengyang, Shanxi province, where Jia was
born) as his subject matter in his Fengyang trilogy (Xiao Wu 小武, 1997),
Platform (站台, 2000), and Unknown Pleasures (任逍遙, 2002), he has said that
“the country scene is the background of China and of the Chinese people . . .
I am ready to admit my origins. I am proud of where I am from but I don’t
want to glorify it with lyricism. I just don’t want to break my link with the
earth” (“Director Jia Zhangke. True to Life”).
In his earlier films, the portrayal of grassroots Chinese life is facilitated by
a realist style, the main features of which are a quasi-documentary use of a
handheld camera, a use of long shots, and amateur actors with strong local
or provincial dialect accents and lots of background noise.13 Handheld cam-
era work conveys the sense of the immediate experience of an involved first
person observer, someone who witnesses the portrayed events on the spot in
the manner of a participant, because there is a rapport and even an organic
unity between the camera and the events that are captured as they unfold in
living time.14 The long shot likewise captures real time, but in a different, more
formalistic, aestheticized manner. The camera observes the characters from a
distance, thereby foregrounding the gulf between the human characters in their
daily experience of monotonous, meaningless time and the progress of histori-
cally significant time marked by the narrative.15 The desire to portray people
“in a very natural realistic state” also motivates Jia’s use of non-professional
actors from rural parts of China with strong local accents. Because of their
training, professional actors find it hard to “adapt their methods of movement
and speech to the kind of documentaryesque type of narrative film” and to fit
in naturally with the surrounding environment whereas amateur actors have
“speech and movements that are extremely natural” and understand what he is
trying to express with his script because they grew up in a similar atmosphere
148 Pheng Cheah
and they believe in the script and the characters and the world it evokes. They
have “a natural confidence and ‘at home’ feeling that professional actors can’t
compare with” ( Jia, “Capturing a Transforming Reality” 198).16
The thematic thread that runs through these comments is the connec-
tion between the fi lmic image, the various components and processes that
produce this image, and the Chinese people in an authentic state or original
condition of living reality (the referent or subject matter of the image). The
relation between the fi lmic image and the referent is that of truth and accu-
racy of representation. This authenticity must be present at every stage of the
production of the fi lmic image. Non-professional actors, by virtue of their
lack of training and their personal experiences of rural and provincial life
similar to the social setting portrayed by the fi lm, have a closer connection
to the real life of the Chinese masses. The rapport and unity between the
camera work, the actors performing their scenes, and the referent of those
scenes indicates an authenticity in the aesthetic techniques. This is precisely
the circle of organic self-return articulated in Gramsci’s idea of the organic
intellectual, a fact made more patent by Jia’s repeated use of imagery of
organic unity and being at home in and having a natural connection to the
surroundings. Jia’s fi lms not only portray and express this natural connection
to the real life of the Chinese masses, but also (re)enable and (re)activate this
connection. They are organic and organicizing for they complete the circle of
organic self-return of the Chinese masses.
This ethical, vocational aspect of Jia’s films is most clearly evidenced in his
emphasis on the creative dimension of his films as narrative films. For him,
the cinematic image has two different origins: the referent and the director.
The image’s original vocation is to have a firsthand, unmediated or direct
relation to the masses through these two origins. The filmic image’s authen-
ticity lies not only in the accurate portrayal of the life of the Chinese masses
but also in the creative human life force unleashed within the director and
expressed in his films, a force that has been stifled by professional filming
techniques and commodity-market demands (Jia Xiang: Jia Zhangke 33).17 In
his well-known short essay “The Age of Amateur Cinema Is about to Return”
(业余电影时代即将再次到来), Jia characterized this creative life force in terms
of the moral values of conscience (良知, liangzhi) and sincerity (真诚, zhencheng)
(in Jia Xiang: Jia Zhangke 33).18 This is the subjective aspect of a film’s authen-
ticity. Jia associates the earnest and responsible filmmaker’s attitude with “the
conscience of the intellectual (知识分子的良心, zhishifenzi de liangxin)” (34).
Its aim is not merely to accurately portray the life experiences of the Chinese
masses. It is also transformative. It seeks to strengthen the will of the masses to
live: to stimulate collective self-awareness in the intended audience and a sense
of fortitude and hope as a result of the knowledge of the human communality
of suffering, that my suffering is common to all human beings.
People are the same all over the world; they go through the same mo-
tions. They face the same spring, summer, fall and winter; the same
birth, ageing, illness and death. I don’t know what this revelation does
to me exactly, but it seems to make me stronger. This personal experi-
ence strengthens me to endure the heavy stress in life. I feel that I’m
not alone. My humble experiences are not unique . . . By watching this
imperfect world, we can become stronger and more optimistic of change
. . . It’s not by shooting a luxurious and happy world that we can affect
the audience. It’s important to keep criticising culture and our society; it
provides a vivid description of human difficulties. I’m going to carry on
making this kind of fi lm, in the hope that audiences will be strengthened
to face daily life. ( Jia in Shih 53–58)
Jia’s humble social background and the fact that he was initially an
underground fi lmmaker further strengthens the popular organic-intellec-
tual dimension of his fi lms, so much so that he has been characterized as
a “fi lm industry migrant worker” (电影民工, dianying mingong) who has a
special connection to the socially marginal characters he portrays, peo-
ple whose living conditions and experiences were not seen on the silver
screen although they make up a large part of the Chinese population (“Jia
Zhangke” 362).19 Indeed, Jia intends his fi lms to be counter-hegemonic
because they bring to view the life-experiences and memories of the
masses that have been occluded from sight by the official state picture of
China. Film reviewers and academic fi lm scholars have largely concurred
on the organic character of his fi lms. Jia’s credentials as an organic intel-
lectual have remained intact despite the fact that he is now no longer an
underground director but is actively courted by the state-run National
Film Bureau. 20 As one fi lm scholar puts it,
Jia’s frequent and unashamed public references to his own relatively

humble geographic and social origins, have made him a veritable poster
boy for the still pending democratization of Chinese fi lmmaking . . .
[M]edia reports on Jia’s work consistently impute to him personal moral
qualities that relate implicitly to the quality and concerns of his fi lms:
“sincerity,” “determination,” and the like. ( Jaffee, “Bringing the World
to the Nation”)
What we see here is an elaborate series of countersignatures that confi rm

the organic character of Jia’s fi lms by attesting to their authenticity and their
provenance. His fi lms originate from two authentic sources: their referent or
subject matter (the Chinese masses) and the creative life force of a popular
intellectual who is himself from the masses. The techniques deployed in the
crafting of the fi lmic image are themselves authentic because they maintain
as close a rapport as possible with their referent. And this chain of authentic-
ity is further affi rmed through the recognition of the international art fi lm
festival and world cinema circuit and the critics and reviewers who preside at
and attend such events. But the fact that this authentication process needs to
150 Pheng Cheah
make a detour through the international stage of critical recognition should
give us some pause about the applicability of Gramsci’s concept, and more
generally, in an era of globalization. In the fi rst instance, the hegemonic
order that Jia is trying to challenge is not a bourgeois state and its form of
society but a rapidly modernizing socialist state in collaboration with global
capital. Second, insofar as the development of counter-hegemonic concep-
tions of the world draws on cultures and traditions from local communities
as resources, we must reckon with the fact that the masses are themselves
displaced by internal and transnational migration and cannot be considered
members of an organic community in an unqualified manner. Third, as Jia
himself has gained international acclaim through the fi lm festival circuit,

his fi lms have received international funding and are also made for a global
audience.21 As I will show via an examination of Jia’s 2004 fi lm, The World
(世界), these global processes radically compromise the processes of organic
development because they disarticulate the social organism as a bounded
whole that is the autonomous subject of its own development. But since these
global processes also enable and constitute the process of the self-return of
the Chinese masses as facilitated by Jia’s fi lms, they indicate that the organ-
ism’s life-process is irreducibly marked by a certain auto-immunity in which
the very self of the organism is contaminated without return.
Jia makes the destabilizing force of globalization the explicit theme of
the two narrative fi lms immediately after the Fengyang trilogy. The World
depicts the destruction of the existing built landscape and the degradation of
lived social place and their replacement by simulacral models characteristic
of industrial and postindustrial capitalist society and its culture of consump-
tion. It contrasts the miserable and aimless lives of the migrant workers who
staff the Beijing World Park with the glitzy images they project as performers
and the replicas of international architectural icons such as the Eiffel Tower
that fi ll the theme park. Still Life (三峡好人, 2006) chronicles the destruction
of old villages and communities by the Three Gorges Dam project and the
ensuing anomie of the displaced poor and migrant workers. This erosion of
organic communal ties may be typical of the violent upheaval of capitalist
modernization. Jia regards this destabilization as a force that is imposed on
the Chinese masses by the collaboration of the Chinese state with global cap-
italism in a post-socialist era. But global capitalist culture is also something
that the masses desired as an alternative to the deprivation of the Commu-
nist years. What is important, however, is that although the masses may also
be implicated in their own alienation by global capitalist consumerism, Jia
regards his fi lms as celluloid records of this upheaval that observe it critically
from an external vantage point rather than being constitutively implicated
in these global processes. In this way, the organic character of his work can
be preserved so that it can stimulate the Chinese masses to think critically
about and change their current conditions, not by returning to a Commu-
nist or traditional past, but by building a future that draws on the positive
resources from these pasts as well as resources from contemporary social
situations and technological innovations that can be organically assimilated
by the masses.
Accordingly, Jia’s comments about The World’s thematic content are part
ambivalence, part lament and part nostalgia. Because global culture, mass
media and information flows in general inculcate in the masses a sense of
individuality and make them aware of the existence of a larger world beyond
their immediate surroundings and the conception of the world promulgated
by the Chinese state, they stimulate an inchoate personal longing for a global
reality that is larger than the state’s official conception of China. However,
and this seems unique to the Chinese situation where extremely rapid mar-
ketization and economic hyper-development abruptly follow a long period of
isolation from the larger world (with the deprivation and repression of desire
this entails) and now coexists with state control, the Chinese masses have a
flawed and self-alienating conception of the world where they see themselves
as already modern and worldly people because of the intense social climate
created by hyper-development. 22 They seek to satisfy their longing for the
world through the materialistic consumption of transnational commodities
and its ersatz social forms (exemplified by the fake landscape of the World
Park) because in their conception of the world, being modern and being
worldly is precisely to be a savvy consumer of foreign objects. But such mate-
rialistic pursuit for illusory things does not lead to a genuinely fulfi lling life. It
is even a form of escapism from social problems because such pursuit inevita-
bly confl icts with the “traditional” values of provincial organic communities
that still exert a hold over the masses even if they are being eroded by rapid
modernization, labor migration, and consumer culture. In Jia’s view, this is
the predicament specific to the Chinese people’s “longing for the world.”
In Chinese society today there are a lot of moments where what’s going
on could be called a show. . . The economy’s doing very well, and every-
where you look you have these “shows,” sort of like economic bubbles,
fi lling up every sector of our lives . . . I think those sorts of environments,
those artificial landscapes, are very significant. The landscape in the
World Park includes famous sights from all over the world. They are
not real, but they still can satisfy people’s longing for the world. They
reflect the very strong curiosity of people in this country, and the inter-
est they have in becoming a part of international culture. At the same
time, this is a very strange way to fulfi ll these demands . . . [I]t makes
for a very sorrowful scene . . . Every time I went to one of the parks for
the shooting, I saw all the tourists and how overjoyed they were to be
there, and for me it was all very sad . . . This is what Chinese reality is
like. And so, in the fi lm, a lot of action takes place under the “Arc de
Triomphe.” Or in front of the “Taj Mahal,” or in “London,” or in “Man-
hattan.” Of course all of these landscapes are fake. But the problems our
152 Pheng Cheah
society faces are very much Chinese issues, and I think all of this is not
unrelated to that. We’re living in a globalised age, in a world saturated
by mass media, in an international city, as it were. But despite all that,
the problems we’re facing are our own problems. ( Jaffee, “An Interview
with Jia Zhangke)
Hence, alongside the lamentation of the suffering caused by globalization,

there is also a certain nostalgia for the disappearing solidarities of organic
communal values. This predicament is neatly captured in a striking image
in the fi lm’s title sequence.
What seems like an advertisement slogan for the World Park (“You
can travel around the world without leaving Beijing”) fl ashes across the
screen accompanied by the web path for the park’s fictitious website, with
the replicas of the Pyramids and the Sphinx of Giza in the background
(see Figure 7.1). The next shot is of the replica of the Eiffel Tower in the
background. An old peasant man, his back bent by a heavy sack prob-
ably fi lled with recyclable garbage slowly walks past. He turns to face the
camera and stares before turning away and making his way across the
screen as the fi lm’s title appears (see Figure 7.2). This sequence juxtaposes
globalization’s promise of illusory mobility with the real time of provincial
life and its hardship. The image of the old man roots the fi lm organically.
His quizzical stare summons and draws the viewer to follow him on his
path across this simulated landscape that allegorizes China’s entry into
the global capitalist system.
Figure 7.1 “You can travel around the world without leaving Beijing,” with fictitious
web path of the park’s website, from title sequence. The World (2004).
Figure 7.2 Old peasant man walking past with replica of Eiffel tower in the back-
ground, from title sequence. The World (2004).
The World portrays the state-sanctioned entry of China into the world
from the oblique angle of how the rapid opening up to flows of transnational
capital impacts the daily lives of the Chinese masses. The fi lm thus gives
a certain look of China to the world. It exposes to the phenomenality of a
wider gaze the lives of those Chinese people who are literally barred from
the world: the masses that desire globality but can only passively suffer its
consequences because they have no self-determined access to it. This the-
matic contrast between the real lives of the masses and the glittering façades
of globalizing post-socialist China runs throughout the entire fi lm. Its central
characters are migrant workers from the provinces who have come to Beijing
and fi nd themselves working in “The World,” a Las Vegas or Epcot® World
Showcase–style theme park.23
The gritty realism used to portray the workers in their dressing rooms
and their private lives is contrasted with the glitzy costumes they put
on as they assume the personae of people from other cultures and the
spectacle of simulated tourist landmarks from around the globe built to
scale with materials similar to those of the originals. As rightly noted, this
frontstage/backstage structure sets up a contrast between reality and spec-
tacle, truth and illusion that the fi lm proceeds to complicate (McGrath
221–22). 24 The park is clearly a synecdoche for the world globalization is
making in the PRC. One of the segments of the fi lm is wittily titled, “A
(New) World Each Day” (Yitian yige shijie, Everchanging world), and a
poster in the dressing room reads in Chinese, “I give you a world” (Wo gei
ni yige shijie). The World cogently captures the speed and intensity of the
flow of global capital through images and sounds of media connectivity
154 Pheng Cheah
and travel: cell phones, instant messaging, and fl ash animation graphics,
trains, planes, and cars, highways and rail tracks that connect Beijing to
the provinces, bringing in migrant workers, even as China is connected
to the rest of the globe and serves both as the source and destination of
clandestine transnational labor.
This world has a surreal quality to it: we see people whizzing around
or passing through this global landscape in a skytrain and other modes
of transportation. Indeed, the fi lm broaches the issue of the digitalization
of their lives by interspersing fl ash animation graphics that show them as
cartoons in cyberspace when they use their cellular phones. The repeated
contrast between this speed and the relative immobility of the park’s work-
ers in their private lives indicates a complex layering of different worlds
onto each other. The viewer gets a sense of the corrosive alienation and
existential solitude that globalization causes by uprooting and driving
people to fi nd jobs in places without any sense of social belonging. The
world globalization creates is not a world in any genuine sense, a com-
munity of intersubjective relations in which one can have a meaningful
life and death. Globalization has made the characters of The World world-
less, or as Heidegger or Arendt would say, weltlos, without world. Here,
and even more so in Still Life, Jia portrays the integration of China into
the global capitalist system as the destructive creation of a ruined world,
a world that has been denuded by demolition, mass displacement, and
environmental pollution as a result of rabid construction in the service of
hyper-industrialization.
The contrast between the real lives of the workers and the simulated
world of the park is, however, not a simple opposition between truth and
illusion. The notion of true reality that underwrites The World far exceeds
any notion of veridical truth, truth as the faithful adequation of fi lmic
representation to the objective world, the principal axiom of cinéma vérité.
The mundane reality of the park workers’ lives faithfully represented by
the fi lm is not a true reality, a reality that has any truth in the ontological
sense. It is already a degraded reality, an alienated reality in the strict
Marxian sense of the word, where the workers have already been cor-
rupted by the consumer desires of capitalist commodification. Unlike the
old man in the title sequence whom globalization has left behind, the two
main characters whose tragic romantic relationship drives the plot, Tao
and Taisheng, are swept up in globalization’s path. They are incorporated
as migrant workers who help to build the new Chinese global dream of
market socialism.
If the park is a synecdoche for the world for local Chinese visitors,
Beijing, like other major Chinese cities such as Shanghai and Shenzhen,
are portals to and enclaves of globality for workers from the provinces.
Tao and Taisheng have their own Beijing dreams. In a scene in Taisheng’s
hot and fi lthy lodgings next to the train tracks, typical of the places where
migrant workers live, he tells her that on his fi rst night in Beijing, he
vowed to make a name for himself in this city so that he can give her a
good life. But although they both pay lip service to the park’s promise of
a cosmopolitan experience, unlike the Chinese visitors to the park, they
sense its hollowness because the illusion they are fabricating contradicts
their private lives. This contradiction between their private and work
lives is not a splitting into true private and false public selves. They are
no more real in their private lives than the personae they project because
they also yearn for a fuller version of the global dream represented by the
park, which they think can be achieved beyond the park’s boundaries,
in the aspiring global city of Beijing. In one of the visual set pieces of the
fi lm, Tao and Taisheng meet during a work break in the cockpit of an old
plane that has been turned into a theme park experience. Dressed in the
costume of a fl ight attendant, she tells him to take her outside the park
because she will soon turn into a ghost if she is stuck there all day (see
Figure 7.3). But the world outside the park is initially also a simulation:
Tao imagines herself as an animation fi gure who levitates in the air and
fl ies past Tiananmen Square with posters of Deng Xiaoping and Jiang
Zemin (the key political architects of the marketization of the Chinese
economy) before ending up in an outlying district as a real life person
(see Figure 7.4).
The park’s replicas are thus not false. They have as much truth as the alien-
ated reality of Tao’s and Taisheng’s lives. Even if Tao leaves the World Park,
in what more truthful reality will she end up? As the PRC state attempts to
Figure 7.3 Tao dressed as a flight attendant. The World (2004).

156 Pheng Cheah
Figure 7.4 Animation of Tao flying past Tiananmen Square. The World (2004).
make China attractive to global capital, many theme park-like global struc-
tures have sprung up in Beijing. They include highly visible public buildings
designed by rock-star architects such as the Bird’s Nest, the Water Cube, the
CCTV tower, and the National Center for the Performing Arts as well as pri-
vate residential villas replicating Versailles and the Louvre in the eighty-two
acre Palais de Fortune compound for China’s wealthiest CEOs and foreign
businessmen.25 A similar habit of consuming replica objects is found at the
lower levels of society. Qun, the woman with whom Taisheng cheats, owns a
tailoring workroom that makes knockoff designer clothes copied from foreign
fashion magazines. Imposter designer bags with fake logos are prominently
visible in her workshop. Throughout the fi lm, there are numerous instances
of the training of park workers, especially women, into modern consumers
who become service providers for the leisure consumption of others in order
to support their own consumption. The path of capitalist consumption is,
however, less salutary for the lower classes. One of the fi lm’s segment titles
is “Paris in a Beijing suburb.” Qun’s husband is an illegal migrant worker
who has lived in Paris for the past decade and she is applying for a visa to
visit him. When Taisheng asks her to visit the park to familiarize herself
with Paris before her trip, she grimly replies that the park does not have the
neighborhood where he lives, Belleville, which is Chinatown in a Paris sub-
urb. The inner truth or telos of “Paris in a Beijing suburb” is to become an
illegal worker in Belleville. 26 Tao has even less freedom of mobility. Not only
has she never been on a plane, she has never even seen a passport and can
only imagine traveling in her fl ights of escapist fantasy in the virtual world
of flash animation.
As we have seen, Jia critically denounces the equation of worldli-
ness with the consumption of foreign commodities as a hollow capitalist
ideology. In a similar vein, although these virtual fl ights in Tao’s imagina-
tion provide her with temporary emotional excitement and comfort, they
are in the fi nal analysis symptoms of a false consciousness, or at least, the
masses’ ignorance and lack of awareness of the truth about their degraded
reality. Indeed, Tao herself seems to be naïve or dense about the oppres-
siveness of the working conditions in the park. She initially cannot or does
not want to acknowledge that Anna, one of the dancers brought from Rus-
sia to work in the park, has been forced into prostitution. The more fun-
damental sense of reality that underwrites Jia’s aesthetic—and what makes
The World an organic intellectual product—is that it points to different
resources from which a truer, non-alienated reality can be created and,

moreover, attempts to be a causal factor in the making of this reality. For
it can be said that instead of merely portraying their conditions accurately
(realism as a mode of representation), The World brings the masses into the
real world in a second, transformative sense. It presents their plight in the
global forum of world cinema while also presenting the masses to them-
selves in a manner that is aimed to stimulate self-awareness so that they
can emerge as something new; that is, transform themselves by learning
to direct their participation in the ever-changing world while maintaining
their integrity as a people, whatever that may be. It is exactly in this sense
that Gramsci saw intellectual/cultural work as completing the circle of the
people’s self-return as an organism.
Jia’s fi lms point to cultural resources in the existing world for this trans-
formative reality. Despite her ignorance, Tao has her own sense of moral
conduct. Unlike some of the other women workers in the park, she refuses
to sell her sexuality for material benefit. Her empathy and friendship with
Anna, the Russian dancer, and her solidarity with other female colleagues
in the park are instances of building a shared space, community or a web
of interpersonal relationships, a world, through acts of kindness that do not
involve self-interest. Taisheng may be a heartless philandering cad, but he
shows a deep sense of responsibility and loyalty to his hometown kin and
friends such as Little Sister, a construction worker who is killed in an acci-
dent. Popular folk religious rituals have a role in world building. Taisheng
and Little Sister’s parents perform a ritual ceremony to appease his spirit at
the construction site where he is killed. But although these different resources
for world formation are immanent to existing reality, they are only activated
either in chance encounters or in moments of crisis and suffering and are
not amenable to permanent institutionalization. The only plausible openings
of other worlds seem to take place beyond the frame of the hollow world of
commodified spectacles for the characters who managed to leave the world
of the fi lm by going elsewhere. Yet, even here, it is suggested that the world
beyond the frame of the fi lm is just as likely to be another world of commodi-
fication. Tao’s former boyfriend leaves to fi nd work in Mongolia. Qun leaves
to join her husband, probably to become an underprivileged illegal migrant
158 Pheng Cheah
in Belleville. We see Anna aboard an Aeroflot fl ight from Beijing to visit her
sister in Ulan Bator, but we are unsure whether she will return to her job as
a sex worker in Beijing.
The only permanent escape is to leave this world by dying. Despite having
lived in Beijing for several years, Tao has remained traditional in her values.
She values her chastity so much that when she finally gives herself to Taisheng,
she tells him that she will kill him if he is unfaithful to her. We can sense that
this will end tragically. She discovers that he cheated on her with Qun and the
film’s final scene shows them as corpses, victims of an accident with a leaking
gas pipe. But it is strongly suggested that she is responsible. The film ends with
an aporia, literally, an impasse, no passage, a road that cannot be crossed: the

screen is pitch black. Taisheng’s voice over says, “Are we dead?” and Tao replies,
“No, we are just beginning.” It remains undecidable for the viewer whether they
have been rescued in enough time to be resuscitated, and so have to remain in
this world, or whether they have crossed into a better world on the other side of
death. Globalization creates a world they cannot tolerate and that literally kills
them and makes them worldless. Or better yet, the only way for them to be part
of a genuine world is to cast aside this one.
But although Jia’s fi lm cannot show us characters who have become genu-
inely real by overcoming the power of consumer desires that have thoroughly
made them over at the level of consciousness and even bodily habits and
needs (the reification of consciousness is the Marxist-savvy word, biopower
the Foucauldian one), the fi lm can promise a true world in the future through
a double gesture: fi rst, it can demystify its Chinese viewers of the myths
of the contemporary Chinese state and global capitalism so that they can
recognize the degree to which their existing reality has been degraded and
second, it can stimulate a counter-hegemonic consciousness that will strive to
create a truly meaningful world.
However, the fi lm encounters a series of blockages that threaten to
undermine the viability of Jia Zhangke’s function as an organic intellectual.
Despite his trenchant critique of globality, The World is a globally produced
object. It is a synecdoche of globality and an example of worldliness par
excellence. The transnational character of the production of cultural and
aesthetic objects can be understood in various ways: in terms of transna-
tional funding sources and corporate involvement; in terms of the diverse
origins of the collaborators in the creative process; or in terms of the fact
that the cultural object is made with the purpose of being disseminated
to markets and audiences beyond the borders of its production that will
lead it to be “consumed” beyond its (national) site of production. The theo-
retical debate about the effects of this transnationalization has predictably
wavered between three diagnoses: cultural homogenization in which the
local is reprocessed and repackaged under the stamp of the global culture
industry, banal cultural hybridization, and the manufacturing of cultural
authenticity; that is, sanctioned cultural difference in a global market. Jia’s
situation is more complex and aporetic. The global nature of the fi lm’s
own production and distribution means that the fi lm’s formal structure of
address is necessarily split. It portrays the ways in which the various char-
acters desire an imagined world of consumer fantasies, for two audiences.
On the one hand, if we are outside China, we look at the characters as they
desire a world that lies beyond the frames of the fi lm where we, the global
audience, are located, the telos of the characters’ desire. On the other hand,
a PRC audience gazes at a celluloid version of its own desire for globality
so that it can critically question this desire and, by extension, the PRC
state’s collusion with this desire in its ideology of market socialism. In the
scenario of strict state control and censorship of cultural production, the

interface of these two different structures of address and reception must be
at an optimum to cultivate a counter-hegemonic consciousness. This is, in
essence, the conceptual basis of the debate concerning the “underground”
or “independent” status of Sixth Generation Chinese narrative and docu-
mentary fi lm: can these fi lms escape the regulatory grip of the PRC state
without succumbing to the pressures and commercializing influence of the
Hollywood culture industry model?
Jia is cognizant of the fact that the global character of his fi lms can be
a mixed blessing. Transnational funding (via Hong Kong as a production
base) is a way of escaping bureaucratic censorship by the PRC state. In
the case of his earlier fi lms, although the state did not prohibit him from
shooting in China, it prohibited the public screening of his fi lms, thereby
making it difficult for Jia to obtain fi nancing for his fi lms within China.
Transnational funding and success in the world fi lm festival circuit, how-
ever, exacts a price. In the fi rst place, although it enables Jia to make fi lms,
the organic connection between the fi lms and the Chinese mass audience
is severed. Despite the international acclaim for his fi lms, Jia is essentially
unknown among the Chinese masses. His earlier fi lms were seen in China
in fi lm fan clubs, minor fi lm festivals, or pirated DVDs. International
acclaim has led to his acceptance by the PRC state, which gave official
approval to the fi lming of The World. But as Jia notes, such approval occurs
because the state no longer views fi lms as a propaganda tool but as a tool
for making money: “Films are now considered to be national properties,
and to be treated as an economic tool” (Shih). In this changed world where
the PRC state has opened up to market imperatives, the influence of trans-
national flows of information and popular culture that had been, in the
years of the Cultural Revolution, resources for individual expression and
creative freedom because of their inaccessibility have now become part of
a larger process of opening up China to the capitalist world system that is
community- and world-destroying.
The solution cannot be to go in the direction of international art fi lm
for at least two reasons. First, the international art fi lm circuit is also a
prestigious niche market in which Jia’s brand of realist cinema will have
160 Pheng Cheah
to compete as a commodity with other types of art fi lm. 27 But more impor-
tant, unless they can cultivate and transform popular taste in China, such
art fi lms are unlikely to appeal to a domestic mass audience that has been
educated to fi nd pleasure in Hollywood-style Chinese commercial cin-
ema. 28 Thus, even though The World and Still Life were released through
officially recognized studios and screened to mass Chinese audiences,
they fared poorly at the box office. Here, then, is the aporia: to be relevant
to and to touch a popular Chinese audience, the fi lms need to be viewed in
China. Cooperation with the PRC state to facilitate distribution involves
compromise, but this can be mitigated through a partnership with trans-
national capital. However, this in turn entails participation in the circuits

of commodification whose negative effects Jia’s fi lms attempt to docu-
ment. Jia has tried to resolve this aporia by championing the importance
of Hong Kong as an organizational center for producing his fi lms because
it is a Chinese space with some independence. As Jia puts it,
[M]y activity cannot be guaranteed inside of China. I need an open

space and international one, because I’ve got to fi nd some investors. I’ve
chosen Hong Kong, since it still keeps free spaces and plus it’s a Chinese
place and this help my communication. So we have come to a decision:
to establish our seat in Hong Kong. This to me sounds like an optimum
compromise, since it’s difficult to count on international collaborations
in Beijing. (Damiani, “A Conversation”)
But given Hong Kong’s historical position as a gateway of trade between

the West and mainland China and its current attempt to reinvent itself
as a global integrator or center for the organization of global produc-
tion chains in East Asia, Jia’s claim about the autonomy of Hong Kong
is disingenuous.
What is especially striking is that Jia’s dilemma parallels that of the
characters of The World. Contemporary mass media, old and new, and the
consumer culture they disseminate enable the concomitant rise of indi-
vidualism and the alienation that accompanies the erosion of communal
solidarity. Elsewhere, Jia describes the inherently alienating character of
mass media as a form of cultural oppression.
The power of the collective was extremely strong [when I was growing
up], and culturally speaking, we always had a lot of confidence. But the
younger generation are faced with a new kind of cultural oppression.
This is in part due to the lifestyles they hear and learn about through
the media—especially the Internet and cable television—which exist on
a completely different plane from their everyday reality. It is this radical
contrast between the reality of their environment and the picture of the
world they get through the media that creates an enormous pressure in
their lives. (“Capturing a Transforming Reality” 193)
Tao’s digital fl ights of fantasy are illusory panacea to this loss of a world. Jia’s
attempt to fi nd a transnational space for creation beyond China puts him
in exactly the same position of the characters who leave the frame of The
World. But like them, it is highly doubtful that Jia can transcend the circuit
of commodification.
This is the aporia faced by the organic intellectual today and why I think
Gramsci’s concept needs to be radically rethought within the context of con-
temporary globalization. Opening up to transnational flows is crucial to coun-

ter-hegemonic struggles against the territorial state. But this presentation of the
picture of the masses to themselves and an alternative conception of the world
through the detour of transnational space to enable the masses to return back
to themselves may very well be an opening without the possibility of return.
The organic intellectual can no longer complete the circle of self-return of the
social organism because he also encounters, at the level of aesthetic produc-
tion, something similar to the erosion of the potentiality of the masses to be
an autonomous self-organizing being by the power of commodification. What
we have here is not the self-returning movement of an organism, its ability to
remain at home with itself in its other in its metabolic relations with the out-
side, but something that is closer to what Derrida has called “auto-immunity,”
a structure of radical contamination in which what enables the self to consti-
tute its proper self is precisely what undoes this self.29 Autoimmunization is a
perversion of the process of immunity. In immunization, a body protects itself
by producing antibodies to combat foreign antigens. In autoimmunization,
however, the organism protects “itself against its self-protection by destroying
its own immune system” (Derrida, “Faith and Knowledge” 73 n27). Autoim-
munization is therefore a radical form of suicide because the organism immu-
nizes itself against its own immunity (Borradori 94).30
The auto-immunity at the level of symbolic production that structures Jia
Zhangke’s film is a synecdoche for the auto-immunity that necessarily follows
at the level of global political economy when the delinking, full or relative,
of socialist countries from the global capitalism is implausible. I have argued
elsewhere that autoimmunity is the condition of financial globalization, where
the constitution of the nation-state’s very selfhood requires the exposure of the
self to the alterity and heteronomy of capital flows (Cheah, “Crises of Money”
189–219). This radical contamination is the true meaning of “organic,” the tech-
nical function of organization taken to its logical extreme: techne as what is arti-
ficial and not amenable to human control even as it is the constitutive feature
of humanity and all its capabilities and powers. Its implications for counter-
hegemonic struggles at the level of culture have to be attended to through the
careful study of concrete cases in the postcolonial world.
162 Pheng Cheah
Notes
1. See also Ngugi Wa Thiong’o, Moving the Centre: The Struggle for Cultural
Freedoms.
2. For an elaborate argument about why the PRC can be seen as a world-historical
experiment in the socialization of a global market economy, see Arrighi, Adam
Smith in Beijing: Lineages of the Twenty-First Century.
3. I am using “formal” and “fi nal” cause in the Aristotelian meaning of the form
and the end of a thing.
4. Addressing the issue of whether members of a political party are intellectuals,
Gramsci notes that one is an intellectual if one’s function is “directive and orga-
nizational, i.e., educative, i.e. intellectual” (SPNB 16).

5. Hence, Gramsci’s famous claim that “all men are intellectuals. . .but not all men
have in society the function of intellectuals” (SPNB 9).
6. For a fuller elaboration of the basic principles of the modern philosophical
understanding of organism and its influence on social and political thought, see
Cheah, Spectral Nationality: Passages of Freedom from Kant to Postcolonial Litera-
tures of Liberation, esp. Chapters 1–2.
7. The paradigmatic example of the autonomous traditional intellectual is the
German idealist philosopher, who thinks of himself “as ‘independent’, autono-
mous, endowed with a character of their own” (SPNB 8).
8. Marx, Zur Kritik der Hegel’schen Rechts-Philosophie. Einleitung, in Marx, Werke,
Artikel, Entwürfe, März 1843 bis August 1844, Karl Marx-Friedrich Engels
Gesamtausgabe.
9. Note, however, that this does not mean that in historical cases, the masses
are not subordinated to intellectuals. This is certainly the case with the
peasant masses, who, according to Gramsci, do not have their own intellec-
tuals (see SPNB 14–15). However, the subordination must be overturned by
assimilating the intellectuals into the peasantry, thereby forming a revolu-
tionary group.
10. See Gramsci’s discussion of the formation of traditional intellectuals from freed
slaves of Greek and Oriental origin in the Roman Empire, and later, from peo-
ple of Romanized origin after the fall of the Roman Empire. In the case of Italy,
intellectuals have a cosmopolitan function because the peninsular lacked cohe-
sion (SPNB 17–18).
11. See, for instance, Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World—A
Derivative Discourse? and Guha, Dominance without Hegemony: History and Power
in India.
12. The rest of this paragraph draws on Wang’s argument.
13. In a perceptive study, Jason McGrath distinguishes between two kinds of real-
ism in Jia’s fi lms, “an ‘on-the-spot’ cinéma vérité realism that draws on a wider
documentary impulse among Chinese artists and fi lmmakers of the 1990s and
a comparatively aestheticized long-shot/long-take realism that draws more upon
a contemporary international art-cinema style” (160).
14. Commenting on Xiao Wu, Jia notes: “I wanted a sensation of being on the spot.
Therefore, I had a lot of hand-held camera work, and there were many imprints
of the auteur. I always say to my cinematographer that we should be bystanders.
When an event happens, we are behind there looking, and we are participating
. . . The starting point is that the camera exists, it is at one with the event that
occurs and it is present at the scene” (Teo, “Cinema with an Accent: Interview
with Jia Zhangke, director of Platform”).
15. This is the approach of Platform (Teo, “Cinema with an Accent”).
16. Cf. Jia’s comment that non-professional actors “really attained a state of natural-
ism, and I wanted also to fi lm that state of naturalism, and they captured that”
(Teo, “Cinema with an Accent”).
17. “When I made Xiao Wu, I wanted to capture that sense of primitive creativity
and to return to that stage of cinematic primevalism . . . That’s the kind of
movie I want to make. Pouring your life force into the movie, not conforming
to a cold industrial standard. That’s why I rejected the use of certain supple-
mentary fi lm techniques such as steadicam or even the track . . . I don’t want

my cameramen to use these supplementary techniques. Because I want my
camera to come into direct contact with the subject” (Teo, “Cinema with an
Accent”).
18. This was fi rst published in Nanfang zhoumo (The Southern Weekly), 1999.
19. “I feel that I have the same character as migrant workers, the same sense of real-
ity. I also feel that the movie screen at that time was not really concerned for this
kind of person, was completely without any concern. I think that I fi lmed Xiaowu
because I felt that I had a kind of dissatisfaction, a kind of life-experience, the
life conditions of many people were hidden from view” (“Jia Zhangke” 362).
Jia’s repeated celebration of the emergence of digital video and the availabil-
ity of cheap cameras as leading to a democratization of Chinese fi lm-making
because more people can become amateur fi lmmakers as a result of greater
access to the means of fi lmmaking is important in this regard. See “Now that we
have VCDs and Digital Video Cameras” (有了 VCD和数码摄像机以后, Youle
VCD he shuma shexiangji yihou) in Jia Xiang, 36–39. For a discussion of Chi-
nese DV documentary, see Yiman Wang, “The Amateur’s Lightning Rod: DV
Documentary in Postsocialist China.” For a comprehensive account of Chinese
independent fi lm and video, see Zhang 23–45.
20. On Jia’s becoming a mainstream or “above ground” director, see Joey Liu, “Wel-
come to the Reel World,” South China Morning Post, November 2, 2004, 5. For a
fuller discussion of the distinctions between “underground” and “independent”
and their implications that also touches on Jia Zhangke’s case, see Pickowicz 1–21.
21. The World was nominated for the Golden Lion Award at the 2004 Venice Film
Festival and Still Life, a fi lm on the The Three Gorges Dam project, won the
Golden Lion Award in 2006. There was a March 2010 retrospective of his work
at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
22. Richard James Havis, “Clarity Begins at Home,” South China Morning Post, April
1, 2005, 5: “Under the surface, China is not as modern as everyone—even the
Chinese themselves—think it is. With The World, I want to show the confl icts
between the superficial idea of modernization and the deeper reality of a much
deeper backwardness . . . A lot of Chinese people . . . believe that China has
really become a part of the international community. But that’s not really a true
reflection of the lives of everyday people in China. A family may be able to visit
the world in the park. But foreign travel is just a dream . . . Most of the individu-
als in China are living in an illusory world . . . They don’t really understand
what the modern world is like.”
164 Pheng Cheah
23. “The World Park” is a real park in the Fengtai District of Beijing, a suburb
sixteen kilometers from the city. The park’s real website is http://www.beijing-
worldpark.com.cn.
The website of the 2008 Beijing Olympics describes it as “featur[ing] 106
of the most famous sites from 14 countries and regions the world over . . . The
tourist can take an electric train and a motorboat through the park to simulate
a trip around the world.” The Epcot World Showcase is a collection of pavilions
in the Walt Disney World Resort, Florida.
24. My interpretation of how the reality/spectacle and truth/illusion oppositions are
undone in The World is different from McGrath’s.
25. On the theme-park atmosphere of luxury villa estates in Beijing, see Fowler.
26. In the Chinese version of the DVD, Belleville is another segment title. Hence,
what was initially an invagination (the outside turned inward—Paris in Beijing)
is turned back outward.
27. On this point, see McGrath 156.
28. Cf. Zhang, “My Camera Doesn’t Lie?” 38–39, who questions the authenticity of
Jia’s fi lms.
29. See Derrida, Rogues: Two Essays on Reason, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and
Michael Naas.
30. The pharmakon is an older name for autoimmunization (Borradori 124).
8 Questioning Intellectuals
Reading Caste with Gramsci in Two
Indian Literary Texts
Rajeswari Sunder Rajan
Antonio Gramsci’s writings on the leadership role of intellectuals frame the

reading of the two literary works that I focus on in this essay, U. R. Anantha
Murthy’s novel in Kannada, Bharathipura (1974), and Indira Parthasarathy’s
Tamil play The Legend of Nandan (1978).1
My interest in these texts is directed at the caste politics they represent,
from a shared authorial perspective broadly identifiable as upper caste but
“progressive.” Their resonance with each other as near-contemporary texts
from the same region, southern India, makes it productive to read them
together, while at the same time, the different languages in which they are
written, their different genres, the different literary histories of which they
are products, and the distinctive caste politics of the states they represent,
Karnataka and Tamilnadu, respectively, require attention to their contrast-
ing literary and political contexts. Written in the 1970s, a decade of consid-
erable political turbulence in post-Independence Indian history, 2 both texts
reflect caste struggle as a key site of political transformation. Literature in the
Indian vernaculars (bhashas) written in this decade, like much of the cinema,
theater and the other arts, was marked by the newfound political engage-
ment that intellectuals were propelled into by the Emergency.
Both Bharathipura and Legend of Nandan build on the recognition of pow-
erful Brahmin hegemony in their respective societies. Both writers are con-
vinced that it is only lower-caste mobilization that can effectively challenge
it, but that this revolution will require the initiative and organizational lead-
ership skills of the Gramscian “organic intellectual” to transform both the
passivity as well as the intransigence of the untouchables into political discon-
tent. Both works are therefore framed by the problematic of the “collective
will.” The test case in both literary works is structured around the untouch-
ables’ entry into the upper-caste temple, which in Bharathipura is coded as
an ostensibly iconoclastic act, and in The Legend of Nandan as an ostensibly
devotional one. The movements end in failure, represented as such in an
uneasily mixed comic-tragic register. The implications of “failure” are, how-
ever, open-ended. Bharathipura poses the dilemma of the crypto-authoritar-
ian leadership assumed by the upper-caste, English-educated landlord, and
166 Rajeswari Sunder Rajan
explores the legitimacy, efficacy and historical necessity of such a situation.
The Legend of Nandan poses the equally fraught question of the exceptional
intellectual who develops from within the group but at odds with it, whose
religio-aesthetic sensibility, aspirational desires and ambivalence toward his
own caste occupation and culture are seemingly both historically necessary
and profoundly flawed. The subjective-psychic operation of desire, which is
also social-instrumental in its dynamics, is central to caste politics as these
works envisage it. But whereas Jagannatha in Bharathipura invokes desire as
the means of raising untouchable consciousness, the Brahmins in The Legend
of Nandan incite the selfsame desire as a way to trap the untouchable Nan-
dan. I shall leave implicit the intriguing parallels and differences between the
two texts—much more can be said obviously about the generic differences
between novel and play, and the contemporary versus historical settings of
each text—but their relevance for certain kinds of Gramscian analysis should
be obvious from this sketch of the arguments they propose.
Postcolonial narratives of social struggle are inevitably located within the
tension, if not actual contradiction, between subalternity and citizenship, 3 and
it is in this context that the role of intellectuals comes to be of central signifi-
cance. In the case of India, the implicit slogan “society must be led” became
the postcolonial bourgeoisie’s rationale for claiming a continuing centrality
for itself in the newly independent nation, constitutionally mandated to be a
democratic republic. Historically, it was the educated, urban, Hindu upper-
caste (and invariably male) leader who emerged from his involvement in the
anti-colonial nationalist struggles as the “voice” of the people. In literary texts
he becomes the focal point of consciousness.4 The Nehruvian state estab-
lished major developmental and modernizing agendas for the nation with
which educated (and especially bureaucratic) elites, in the decades immedi-
ately following independence, were closely associated. Post-Nehru, the belief
increasingly spread that the state had ceased to be the primary agent of social
change. The question of a civil society in India on the model of Western lib-
eral democracies—its constitution, its autonomy from the state, its conditions
of possibility, and the extent of its hegemony—has been widely debated since
then. Political analysts like Rajni Kothari have forcefully argued the need for
“grass-roots movements and non-party political formations” that will consti-
tute an “autonomous force of civil society,” in opposition to a state that came
to be perceived as “repressive and increasingly unrepresentative” (Chatter-
jee, State and Politics in India 43–44). 5 In her major book about the new
social movements in western India, Gail Omvedt celebrated the emergence
of new actors on the “stage of history” in the 1970s and 1980s. “For many of
India’s oppressed and low-caste poor,” she writes, “the aspiration and reality
of becoming historical actors was something new in their lives.” But at the
same time she identifies the limits of these new roles. Agency had to be medi-
ated and was sometimes usurped by their representatives (Reinventing Revo-
lution, 250–51). In particular, wherever or whenever “people’s movements”
Questioning Intellectuals 167
failed—either to materialize “spontaneously” or to sustain themselves at the
grassroots—they have been taken over by well-meaning elite “volunteers”6
acting in the belief that the people must be “mildly forced to be free.” Their
“evangelical impatience,” to borrow Sudipta Kaviraj’s ironic description of
middle-class leaders, is embodied perfectly in the character of Jagannatha,
the protagonist of Anantha Murthy’s Bharathipura (Kaviraj, “In Search of
Civil Society” 287–323, esp. 322).
Modern political democracy in India came into direct confrontation with
the institution of caste. It is not of course the case that constitutional equality
would, or indeed could, demolish caste-based hierarchy in a single stroke.
What the confrontation meant was that the problematic was newly structured
by caste perceived as injured identity, pitted against the potential and limits
of political rights to address that condition (Rao). Opposed and diverse inter-
pretations of caste as the ideological product of religious doctrine, ritual or
belief, on the one hand, and as a socioeconomic material condition of pov-
erty, disprivilege, discrimination and occupational marginalization, on the
other, have generated multiple modes of caste struggle, led by both upper-
caste reformers and untouchable leaders with different emphases.
Caste, with its close parallels to race and ethnicity as a discriminatory
social system, its overlaps with class as an hierarchical division of labor, and
its inextricability from gender and sexuality, has been a potent field of hege-
mony’s operations in India in the past as well as the present, allowing us to
invoke Gramsci’s understanding of power, confl ict and counter-hegemonic
struggle productively in reading its narratives. Hegemony is a concept that
has considerable explanatory power for understanding the otherwise inex-
plicable millennial reign of upper-caste (specifically Brahmin) domination
that based itself on hereditary authority, cultural superiority, monopoly over
learning, economic power and rights of governance—an arrangement that
could not have been maintained without the consent of the subordinated.
(One of the few direct references that Gramsci makes to India is an allu-
sion to the caste system when he observes, “In both India and China the
enormous gap separating intellectuals and people is manifested also in the
religious field” [SPNB 23]). The hegemony of Brahmins has survived into
postcolonial modernity, thanks to a combination of factors: support from
colonial administration, the mobilization of the Hindu religious establish-
ment, upper castes’ opportunistic alliances with upwardly mobile lower
castes, and Brahmins’ selective appropriation of and successful adaptation
to aspects of modernity. Of course, it is not the case that it is only by consent
and moral suasion that caste hierarchy is maintained. Violence and coercion
are all too often resorted to as a means of controlling lower caste challenges
to the caste order. The narrative Gramsci offers of Jacobinism’s fortunes in
France following the Revolution into the “parliamentary regime” is appli-
cable with very few modifications to the narrative of caste struggles in India
from the colonial into the postcolonial period:
The entire society was in a continuous process of formation and disso-
lution, followed by more complex formations with richer potentialities
. . . In this process, attempts at insurrection alternated with pitiless re-
pression, enlargements of political suffrage with restrictions, freedom of
association with restriction or annulment of that freedom . . . The “nor-
mal” exercise of hegemony on the now classical terrain of the parliamen-
tary regime is characterised by the combination of force and consent,
which balance each other reciprocally, without force predominating ex-
cessively over consent. (SPNB 80 fn49)
The relatively effortless portability of Gramsci into Third World contexts

is most commonly explained with reference to Eric Hobsbawm’s argument
in support of a wider applicability of the Italian Marxist’s theorization of
world capitalism:
Italy was, as it were, a microcosm of world capitalism inasmuch as it

contained in a single country both metropolis and colonies, advanced
and backward regions . . . [A]n intelligent Italian marxist was in an un-
usually good position to grasp the nature both of the developed capital-
ist world and the “Third World” and their interactions, unlike marxists
from countries belonging entirely to one or the other. Gramsci therefore
was not exclusively “a theorist of ‘western communism.” His thought
was neither designed exclusively for industrially advanced countries,
nor is it exclusively applicable to them. (“Gramsci and Political Theory”
205–12, esp. 206)
I have taken this as license to “apply” hegemony to the Indian context of

caste, and have deployed caste subalternity as homologous with subalter-
nity in conventional class terms, that is, the untouchable as continuous
with Gramscian “peasant” or “worker.” This subsumption largely reflects
the social reality of India. That outcasts/untouchables occupy the economic
margins as oppressed class and gendered subjects, are subject to forms of
racialized discrimination, and collectively lack the “political organization
and representation” of the typical proletariat, are facts that make them the
paradigmatic subalterns in a specifically Indian context.
Gramsci is useful as well for the questions of representation I foreground
in the caste context—that is, questions of subjectivity and leadership—because
of the cultural component of caste identity which derives from the caste’s
“primordial” connection to religion. Since Gramsci’s ideas of hegemony
draw heavily from the significance he attaches to the influence of the Catho-
lic Church in Italy, they serve in my view as a resource for reading caste.
On the one hand, Gramsci viewed religion with the familiar skepticism of
the secular, left intellectual; his personal knowledge and experience of the
Catholic Church in Italy inclined him to view it as supremely hegemonic.
But keenly aware of the ideological “strength” that the Catholic Church pos-
sessed, Gramsci located it primarily in the “doctrinal unity of the whole mass
of the faithful,” a unity achieved by the Church ensuring that “the higher
intellectual stratum does not get separated from the lower” (SPNB 328). (As
noted earlier, Gramsci did not believe this was the case in religion in India
or the East Asian countries.) Gramsci therefore found a model in the Church
for Marxism. As a “philosophy of praxis,” the latter must remain close to
the experience of the people and their “common sense,” in emulation of the
former (SPNB 332).7
Although not exclusively or wholly grounded in religion, and more gener-
ally tending to follow the variable and shifting dynamics of custom, caste
derives considerable sanction from divine ordination. This explains caste
hegemony as we saw. On the other hand, religion, in its heterodox aspects,
held the potential for radicalism. Gramsci’s interest in the Reformation in
Europe was prompted by the historical evidence that religious beliefs could
also be critically negotiated to produce an alternative and oppositional con-
sciousness, given the right circumstances.8 Buddhism in India, doctrinally
caste-free and gender-equal, arose as a challenge to Brahminism in the sixth
century BC, followed by the Reformation-like bhakti movement from the
twelfth to the fi fteenth centuries. In the present day, many dalits have refused
to be counted as “Hindu” and either resort to converting to another religion,
or insist on the separation and distinctiveness of their own religious culture. 9
In the two texts that I discuss in this chapter, caste struggle is located in the
historical example of lower castes’ attempts to enter the forbidden territory
of the upper-caste Hindu temple. The complex politics of this movement,
coded as simultaneously religious/iconoclastic and political/secular, raises
questions about caste’s relation to religion that are examined in more detail
in the discussion of the texts’ representation of temple entry.
Caste was given little prominence in the political schema of newly inde-
pendent India in Nehru’s regime. It was refused consideration even as a social
determinant of poverty, let alone as political identity. The caste dynamics
represented in these two texts from southern India reflect a significant shift
in the politics of caste that occurred in the 1970s, moving it toward a more
identity-based social movement. (There is a general pan-Indian dimension to
caste politics, although regional specificities are of significance as well.) The
Dalit Panthers movement in Maharashtra was the most significant indication
of this change. The radical dalit youth who constituted the movement drew
inspiration from the militant race struggles in the United States. Gopal Guru
and Anuradha Chakravarty describe their politics as representing a “Grams-
cian brand of Marxism” insofar as they focused their efforts in the cultural
sphere, contesting the “ideological, moral, and cultural superstructure of the
political-economic system.” “They missed, however, a key insight of Grams-
cian Marxism,” they regret. What was needed was a “degree of political
organization, the strength of political alliances, and the relations of force
within a particular historical bloc of contention,” which they were not able to
muster (146–47). In particular, the Dalit Panthers, an urban working- class
movement, failed to mobilize untouchables in the rural areas, a failure that
is notably Gramscian in its diagnosis.
In Tamilnadu since the 1970s, dalits have adopted heterogeneous
modes of activism; forming NGOs that focus on promoting dalit educa-
tion, employment opportunities, and human rights; resorting to Com-
munist militancy (primarily over agricultural land issues); following the
path of Christian liberation theology; and allying with political parties to
capture power at local and regional levels. Jean-Luc and Josiane Racine
emphasize the centrality that questions of culture came to have in dalit

struggles in Tamilnadu, even though the revolutionary Communist party
(Marxist-Leninist) took the lead in agricultural areas by organizing dalit
laborers in land struggles (5–19). A key event in the history of the dalit
movement in Tamilnadu was the tragedy in Kilvenmani, a village in the
Thanjavur district of Tamilnadu in which more than forty dalit farm
laborers were burned alive by landlords for demanding higher wages (an
event represented by Indira Parthasarathy in a powerful and controver-
sial novel, Kuruthippunal (River of Blood) in 1975). The controversy over
whether these laborers were punished because of their caste identity as
dalits or as class-subjects continues to this day. That violence against dal-
its is a continuing reality in the face of both state-led initiatives such as
rights and reservations, as well as dalit-led movements for emancipation
and political influence, marks caste as a primary site of social confl ict in
the state. It is into this volatile situation of caste hegemony, growing dalit
mobilization and empowerment, and upper-caste retaliatory violence in
the state of Tamilnadu in the 1960s to the 1970s that Indira Parthasara-
thy’s play, like his earlier novel, made its intervention.
In Karnataka, a more specifically literary revolution was initiated in the
1970s, following what came to be known as the “busa controversy” when
the dalit politician B. Basavalingappa dismissed all Kannada (upper-caste)
literature, classical as well as modern, as useless (busa, meaning husk). This
provoked caste ire, but at the same time, led dalit and shudra (other back-
ward caste) intellectuals to reject the dominant literatures of the past includ-
ing the modernist movement (navya) (to which the writer U. R. Anantha
Murthy belonged). The Dalit-Bandaya (rebel) movement engaged in seri-
ous debates about cultural issues especially as they related to dalit “cultural
memory.” The well-known Kannada critic D. R. Nagaraj is a product of this
phase of the cultural politics of the region. Anantha Murthy, sympathetic to
but not always in agreement with the dalit movement, took the position that
literary criticism would need to be equally attentive to questions of form and
aesthetics, while he was clearly also deeply engaged by caste and the role
literature played in effecting social change that the dalit cultural movement
brought to the fore.10
This is by way of setting the stage for “questioning” intellectuals, the
Gramsci-aided interrogation of the major thematic preoccupation of these
works, to which I now turn.
Bharathipura
Bharathipura is a work of searing brilliance by one of contemporary Kan-
nada literature’s major figures. Asking how caste critique can be articulated
by a man belonging to the upper caste, and whether dalit revolution in the
form of temple entry can be led by a Brahmin, it engages these questions in
a profoundly experimental mode. That Anantha Murthy envisages such cri-

tique and praxis in opposition to the expected Gandhian forms is of further
extraordinary interest.
The book opens with Jagannatha, a wealthy young Brahmin landlord,
returning from his studies in England to his native Bharathipura, a small
temple town in the district of Shimoga in northern Karnataka. The temple of
Manjunatha dominates the town, making it a famous pilgrim location. Jagan-
natha’s family has been for many generations a patron of the temple. Jagan-
natha feels he is an unreal and inauthentic person until he loosens the hold of
caste-based religion over the untouchables. He begins to build a movement
for their entry into the temple where they are ritually forbidden. Jagannatha’s
decision to rouse the untouchables to defy the hegemony of the temple and
the Brahmins in the town is attended by long and intense discussions with a
whole range of friends and opponents. Above all, the decision is accompa-
nied by Jagannatha’s profound musings—political, ethical and existential—as
confided to his private journal.
The climax of the novel is reached with the temple entry. Before the
climatic event, Jagannatha stages a sort of dress rehearsal by making the
untouchables go through a test. The “shaligrama test” in Bharatipura is a well-
known, often-cited literary episode. In a passage of unbearable intensity and
tense drama, Jagannatha picks up a shaligrama, a sacred fossilized stone that
has been worshipped in the puja-room of his home for centuries, and brings
it outside the house as an object to be touched—and thereby desacralized—by
the untouchables. He encounters opposition from everyone around him, high
caste and low, though the opposition is limited to silent resistance. Here is the
extract from the novel, some of it in the form of a stream of consciousness:
The words that Jagannatha wanted to say stuck in his throat. In a sense,
he told himself, “This is fi rst matter, a mere stone. Touch this. I hold
my life in my hand in offering this to you. Touch this. The deepest part
of my inner being is invested here. Touch this. This is the propitious
hour of the evening prayers. Touch this. The eternal lamp is burning
in vain in the puja room. Touch this. My people at my back are pulling
at me, reminding me of a thousand obligations. What are you waiting
for? Touch this. Understand what is happening here. By offering this as
a mere stone, I turn it into a shaligrama. The minute you touch this,
it turns into a mere stone for all these people. My anguish will then
become a shaligrama. Because I offer this to you, because you touch it
and because these people will witness this on this darkening evening, let
stone turn into shaligrama and let shaligrama turn into stone. You Pilla
. . . touch this and turn it into stone. After that, in a single step, crossing
the threshhold of the temple, centuries will be shaken. Touch this. Touch
it now. Touch, touch . . . See how easy it is! Touch!” (148)
But the pariahs recoil in horror. Jagannatha tries persuasion, then great rage
overpowers him, and he “turned cruel.” “They appeared to him like dis-
gusting worms.” As he shouts at them, “Touch this, touch this, touch!” they
respond with fear, “the untouchables came forward mechanically, touched
with no feeling whatsoever what Jagannatha had extended to them and with-
draw swiftly.” The rest is anticlimactic.
Jagannatha, weakened by cruelty and grief, threw away the shaligrama.

His moral anguish had been thoroughly twisted and distorted. He had
even lost for a moment the very human feeling Chiki had for the untouch-
ables. He had seen them as meaningless things. Jagannatha stood, hang-
ing his head. He did not realize that the untouchables had left. When
he found out that there was no one around him, it was already dark.
Loathing himself, he paced around for a while. How he and they had
died, losing their humanity, when they touched the stone! The reason for
it—was it inside him, or outside in society? (Bharathipura 148 –50)
The episode is a “parable” in Anantha Murthy’s own words, accruing deposits

of meaning and susceptible to a variety of interpretations by those reading
it for their own ends.11 D. R. Nagaraj highlights an aspect that is relevant to
my interest here in exploring the implications of the distance and difference
between Jagannatha and the untouchables. Nagaraj describes Jagannatha’s
rebellion as stemming from “ontological” rather than “organic” necessity since
he, Jagannatha, is not himself a “direct victim” of “the structures of humiliation
and deprivation that he is fighting” but is instead “driven by a deeper desire to
establish a more humane and meaningful relationship with the world” (Intro-
duction to Bharathipura, ix).12 The novel’s interest, Nagaraj goes on to point
out, lies in the tragic drama of Jagannatha’s “martyrdom and despair.” There
is no denying that the novel’s finest success is to mark through this struggle a
growth in the political consciousness of Jagannatha, as revealed in the novel’s
conclusion: in his startlingly feminist acceptance of his mother’s sexual infidel-
ity, his renunciation of his lands, his entry into politics as vocation, and his
announcement of the “birth of a new man within” (Bharatipura 203). Anantha
Murthy himself would no doubt grant this intention.
Nagaraj acutely notes that the cruel consequence of the rebel’s “grandeur,
misery and sentimental attachment to his cause” is that, “in a moment of
crisis it transforms itself into pure hatred of the subjects of his cause” (Intro-
duction to Bharathipura x). In the face of Jagannatha’s bullying tactics the
untouchables, as we saw, are reduced to passivity, silence and sullen resis-
tance. Along with this failure of humanity, Jagannatha fails strategically also,
his intended “act of negation ironically leading to an affi rmation of the same”
(Introduction x). Anantha Murthy—and Jagannatha himself—include these
critiques of his failure in the episode’s narration and analysis. The self-cri-
tique is not simply a rhetorical move intended to pre-empt outside criticism,
but the intellectual’s spontaneous, introspective analysis of the limits and

costs of ideological struggles led by people like himself.
Where, however, would this critique leave Jagannatha’s and the novel’s
diagnosis of caste oppression? True, Jagannatha’s strategy is misplaced, not
only in the initial shaligrama episode, but also in the climactic temple entry
scene. The untouchables arrive at the temple drunk and frightened, dissolv-
ing into confusion at the crucial point of entering the temple, and fi nally
have to be dragged into the temple by one of the organizers. The idol has
meanwhile been taken away and hidden in a genuine act of iconoclasm by
the priest’s son, Ganesha. In an ironic reversal of meaning, this act is instead
publicized as a devotional one of “rescue”; the temple is not polluted thanks
to the idol’s absence at the time. The temple entry collapses into fiasco. All
is as it was, and Brahmin hegemony is seemingly restored. How does the
failure impact upon the revolutionary enterprise?
I wish to read Jagannatha’s anti-caste mission against the grain of its end-
ing in failure in what might seem an inapposite way. Despite his culpable
violence and self-centeredness, Jagannatha’s actions are impelled by faith
in the transformability of dalit consciousness, accompanied by a commit-
ment to exploring the modalities of such transformation. In what follows, I
shall trace his train of thought and actions in some detail. He operates with
the logic of touch, appropriately since touch is the ground of untouchables’
oppression (“touch has become one of my themes”) (Anantha Murthy,
“Five Decades of My Writing”). When Sripathi Rao admonishes him, “It’s
not a question of whether you touch them. What’s important is whether they
touch you or want to,” he agrees enthusiastically: “Yes, you’re right, Rao.
The day the untouchables want to touch me will be the day of my triumph.
I am trying to make it possible for them to have this explosion in their con-
sciousness. The day they make bold to take this one step” (Bharatipura 84).
Jagannatha comes to the determination to provoke the untouchables—to
“jealousy and greed” if need be—via Engels, “Doesn’t Engels say the reason
for history’s march is the evil passion of men?” As he plans the shaligrama
test of touching, he dreams, “The untouchables too should desire what we
want. An untouchable young man should be able to desire a Brahmin girl.
A Brahmin girl should want to sleep with an untouchable. Without desire,
they will not learn to read and write. From desire, pain. From pain, con-
sciousness” (Bharathipura 138).
Fanon is relevant here. “The look that the native turns on the settler’s town
is a look of lust, a look of envy, it expresses his dream of possession—all man-
ner of possession—to sit at the settler’s table, to sleep in the settler’s bed, with
his wife if possible. The colonized man is an envious man” (The Wretched of the
Earth, trans. Constance Farrington 39). That which Fanon sees as the spon-
taneous, existing consciousness of the native leading to anti-colonial violence
(violence as a “cleansing force” that “frees the native from his inferiority com-
plex and from his despair and inaction, [and] restores his self-respect”)—this
consciousness is what Jagannatha will first have to provoke in the untouchable

whom centuries of religious belief have cowed into submission (94).
Jagannatha’s is a preposterous project and projection of desire, the desir-
ing of another’s desire. We are not meant to be blind to the contradictions
inherent in his stating “they should desire.” And the fraternity forged from uni-
versal male sexual desire is undeniably problematic, “they too should desire
what we want,” what the men want being the Brahmin woman (but note, she
should desire the untouchable back). The metonymic series of cause-and-
consequences that Jagannatha envisages—desire-pain-consciousness—is the
inexorable path to be followed by the untouchable, without exception. And
sure enough, following the disastrous encounter with the shaligram, Pilla,
the untouchable approaches a naked upper-caste woman, Kaveri, when the
opportunity offers itself. When Pilla sees her naked with an upper-caste man
he rushes to the scene, it might be with rescue in mind. Rightly or wrongly,
Jagannatha links Pilla’s awakening of desire for the woman to his experience
of having touched the shaligrama. As might be expected, Pilla is framed and
arrested, beaten up by the police, and jailed until he is rescued by Jagannatha.
This experience of gratuitous violence, by Jagannatha’s logic, will act as the
spur to Pilla’s future rebellion. Jagannatha’s earlier failure of humanity in
the shaligrama episode is redeemed at this point with his realization that
“both he and Pilla had desired the same girl. The strong black body facing
him under the gas light was like his own, carnal and fully alive. Jagannatha
thought that he could really touch this untouchable” (55).
Desire may be shared between the men, but what of the pain? It is, after
all, Pilla who is beaten up, and it is the untouchables whose houses are burnt
down in upper-caste retaliation for their defiance. Jagannatha may bail Pilla
out and build new houses for the untouchable tenants and fi nd them new
jobs; but the ethical issue of responsibility remains. Fanon’s invocation of
violence, like Jagannatha’s of pain, is susceptible to the accusation of glib-
ness, of a too easy resort to the argument of historical necessity. As Nagaraj
says, “The obsession with the historical hardly respects the existential and
the quotidian” (Introduction to Bharathipura x).
I must leave this as a question with a resonance beyond this context.
Would a gradualist pace of reform be necessarily painless? Would a dalit-led
revolution be able to avoid pain, sacrifice and retaliatory violence? Would
not the preservation of the status quo (based on a functionalist argument for
caste) guarantee the most painless existence after all? Further, in what sense
can Jagannatha be said to oppose the will of the untouchable peasants? It is
not as if they have a defi nite alternative agenda, unless it be to continue as
they are, not exactly a matter of decisive existential choice. And surely we
are allowed to argue “if the modern iconoclast is dehumanizing the Dalits by
his actions . . . the established power structures also dehumanize the dalits”
(Mallavarapu and Prasad 194).
I turn now to a question I posed at the outset about Jagannatha envisag-
ing his project in implicit opposition to the Gandhian forms of caste critique
and praxis (I have suggested that it is instead Fanonian in spirit). Gandhi’s
ethical address to the caste issue was an appeal to upper castes to transcend
caste consciousness; Jagannatha’s, as we saw, is an incitement of the “evil
passions of [dalit] men.” Congress-led temple entry had been prominently
practiced in the 1920s and 1930s in the Gandhian mode of satyagraha; Jagan-
natha instead envisages it in the independent India of his time as a storming
of the Bastille.
Temple satyagraha had been attempted by dalits in large numbers under
the leadership of the dalit leader, Dr. B. R. Ambedkar, but with different
ends in view than Gandhi’s. Ambedkar was at pains to provide a correct
understanding of this symbolic struggle under his leadership. Entry into
temples (as also taking water from temple tanks) staked dalits’ claim for
equal access to public spaces. It was emphatically not an expression of Hindu
devotion, but rather an expression of their claim to modern political rights.
As Ambedkar put it succinctly in a speech, “The issue is not entry but equal-
ity” (qtd. in Rao 85). Dalit demands were coded in the language of univer-
sal civic rights, and Hindu temples were re-designated by them as (secular)
public spaces. This was an idiom very different from Gandhi’s argument for
untouchable entry into temples that was targeted primarily at the reform of
caste Hinduism, to be achieved entirely by upper castes’ voluntary change
of heart. Gandhi castigated the independent initiative of dalits in starting the
temple satyagrahas since he held that they were incapable of conducting it in
the disciplined spirit of non-violence that he advocated (Rao 93–94).
Although Jagannatha, as a Brahmin himself, might be expected to sub-
scribe to the Gandhian credo, the emphasis on upper-caste reform and
non-violence that such an allegiance would require is conspicuously absent
from his arguments. The novel in fact gently satirizes a minor character
(Ananthakrishna, a Sarvodaya activist) for the Gandhian language he ban-
dies, even though he does support Jagannatha’s temple entry project. He
is shown to be more concerned about “the need for non-violence” while
staging the temple entry, and about the benefit a caste-reformed Hinduism
would gain from it (“the glory of Manjunatha would be enhanced by the
entry of the untouchables into the temple”) (Anantha Murthy, Omnibus 231).
But Jagannatha neither takes recourse to the more advanced language of
rights nor challenges the so-called “private” terrain of the Hindu temple,
as Ambedkarite activists did. His reasoning most closely resembles instead
Ambedkar’s as expressed in the following letter he wrote:
I did not launch the temple entry movement because I wanted the De-
pressed Classes to become worshippers of idols . . . or because I believed
that temple entry would make them equal members in and an integral
part of Hindu society . . . [but] only because I felt that was the best way
of energizing the Depressed Classes and making them conscious of their
position. (qtd in Omvedt, Ambedkar 57)
These multiple positions around temple entry—Fanon’s putative violence,

Gandhi’s non-violent satyagraha, Ambedkar’s strategic consciousness-rais-
ing—reveal its multi-dimensionality as a political and ethical crux of the caste
struggle. The space of the novel allows the author to explore the limits and
possibilities of temple entry as political experiment, even if somewhat anach-
ronistically. It is this openness that makes Bharathipura, to my mind, a work
of such profound engagement.
It is interesting and surely significant that in Bharathipura, Anan-
tha Murthy combines a Gramscian-Ambedkarite interest in the strategic
aspects of subaltern mobilization of this kind, with more specific ethical
issues surrounding subaltern representation. Like most other critics of the
novel, it is the latter that I have focused on until now. Such ethical issues
have been of particular concern to the Subaltern Studies school in their
engagement with the peasant and tribal in colonial history. In the novel,
the focus on the upper-caste protagonist’s subjectivity at the expense of the
untouchables, and the rendering of Jagannatha’s behavior as coercively
modernizing, dehumanizing, and arrogantly knowing in both thought and
praxis, highlight the kind of ethical dilemma that Dipesh Chakrabarty, for
instance, has found intellectually paralyzing. Chakrabarty has expressed
acute angst about what he sees as the non-democratic nature of the subaltern
historian’s “dialogue” with the object of his study. Subaltern Studies itself,
he feels, in its foundational allegiance to Gramsci, was guilty of such a
“pedagogic” address to the subaltern, one that foreclosed on the possibility
of the historian’s being able to learn from the other. Chakrabarty deplores
Gramsci’s view of subalternity as a political position that, “by itself, was
incapable of thinking the state” and his conviction that “this was a thought
to be brought to that position by the revolutionary intellectual” (34). Gram-
sci, on the other hand, as Timothy Brennan has explained, viewed the
subaltern primarily as “the target of organizational overcoming” rather than
as “an already complete ‘resistant presence’” (“Antonio Gramsci and Post-
colonial Theory” 143–87, esp. 170; emphasis added). I shall return to this
less-discussed Gramscian dimension of the caste politics of the novel after
fi rst clarifying a couple of points relating to the debate on the ethical issues
at stake.
The fi rst relates to the controversial question of subaltern representation.
Gramsci’s understanding of peasant consciousness (especially in “backward”
countries, as he explains) is lacking in the kind of political correctness we
have come to expect in representations of the subaltern.13 In several of the
articles he wrote for the party journal the subaltern is at best regarded as a
“pre-political” “primitive rebel” (Hobsbawm, Primitive Rebels). Hobsbawm
and Gramsci share the view that the subaltern was capable of sporadic vio-
lent revolts but not of a sustained campaign. The peasant, Gramsci notes,
may “erupt in violent revolt against the ‘gentry’ every now and then, but he is
incapable of seeing himself as a member of a collectivity (the nation for the
land-holders, the class for the proletarians), nor can he wage a systematic and
permanent campaign designed to alter the economic and political relations
of society” (in Forgacs, The Antonio Gramsci Reader 114).
At the same time Gramsci also took seriously as we know the “common
sense” of the peasant, gave credit to the “necessity” of his religion, and pur-
sued an interest in folklore. His suggestive observations about the role of
culture in shaping the revolutionary consciousness anticipate Fanon’s memo-
rable injunction to intellectuals participating in decolonizing movements: “It
is not enough to get back to the people in that past out of which they have
already emerged; rather we must join them in that fluctuating movement
which they are just giving shape to . . . It is to this zone of occult instability
where the people dwell that we must come” (The Wretched of the Earth 227).
Like Fanon, Gramsci was convinced of the need to involve the peasantry in
the revolutionary project and believed in their political potential.14 Note that
the passage cited above does not propose a reified peasant consciousness. On
the contrary it is a prelude to Gramsci’s optimistic observation that participa-
tion in the war of 1914 “radically changed the peasant psychology” (emphasis
added). The war opened up to the subaltern class a knowledge of the larger
world, forged solidarities among the soldiers, and fashioned a “common,
united spirit,” so much so that “a spiritual world emerged that was avid to
form itself into permanent and dynamic social structures and institutions” (in
Forgacs, Gramsci Reader 115).
It is this kind of understanding of subaltern consciousness, based on
a closely observed knowledge of the “totality of subaltern existence” that
Bharathipura also expresses—and being novelistic fiction is particularly fit-
ted to express.15 As in Gramsci’s writings, the emphasis in the novel is on
dalit potentiality, change and growth of political consciousness rather than
on the “autonomy” and “spontaneity” that invests subalterns with a spuri-
ous “agency,” or the kind of “respect” that would preserve them in their
immutable difference. Here for instance is a passage that expresses Gram-
sci’s faith in subaltern will and its capacity for transformation that resonates
closely with Jagannatha’s hopes for untouchable emancipation: “[B]asically
if yesterday the subaltern element was a thing, today it is no longer a thing
but an historical person, a protagonist.” This quickly leads to the insight,
“But even yesterday was it ever mere ‘resistance,’ a mere ‘thing,’ mere ‘non-
responsibility?’ Certainly not.” Gramsci attributes the earlier condition to
“fatalism,” which is “nothing other than the clothing worn by real and active
will when in a weak position.” Intellectuals who subscribe to a philosophy
of such “mechanical determinism” end by making it a “cause of passivity, of
idiotic self-sufficiency” (SPNB 337).
Gramsci’s warning is useful to bear in mind when we turn to certain pop-
ular misconceptions about Jagannatha’s pedagogy. Like many other readers,
Latour makes the assumption that the shaligrama experiment is intended

to vanquish the untouchables’ superstitious faith. Not so: it is the Brahmins’
fetish—and to a considerable extent the unacknowledged hold that it has
on his own psyche as well—that Jagannatha wishes to de-fetishize. There is
nothing to suggest that the shaligrama means anything to the untouchables
other than an object that belongs to the Brahmins and hence is forbidden to
their touch. It is the prohibition they respect, not the stone. It is this taboo
(to invoke another Freudian term) that Jagannatha wishes to break by the
empirical challenge of touch: “See? Nothing happened.”16 (And at the same
time that he sets out to prove the inconsequentiality of touch, he also, let us
note, seeks to fi ll it with the charge of sexuality.) The distinction between
fetish and faith is the distinction between the traditional and the organic
intellectual’s respective responses to a stone. And it is the former that stands
in need of correction, not the latter.
To regard Jagannatha as a modernizing, secular force is therefore correct
but insufficient. Certainly he is armed with his reading of Russell and Marx,
and it is true that he wishes to force the pace of change. But he is only too
aware that the millennial power of religion will not be defeated by theatri-
cal flourishes. The narrative reversals with which the book concludes have
something of inevitability about them. That the attacks on the mystique of
deities and sacred objects should rebound, and that the desecrated shali-
grama should be purified and reinstalled, the idol recovered, and the temple
the untouchables entered be cleansed and made fit for upper-caste worship
again: none of this should surprise us. The hold of caste goes beyond religion
as we saw, and therefore the secularizing or iconoclastic response has only
limited impact. The sociality of caste relations is built on tradition (history,
culture) and derives its meaning from the force of material conditions, both
economic and political. It requires a revolutionary praxis for which ideology
critique is a necessary fi rst step, even if only the fi rst step.
In summing up the ethical import of Jagannatha’s movement, I would be
inclined to argue that even where the novel shows the troubling aspects of
elite-led reform, it redeems it by identifying the democratizing impulse that
lies at its heart. In Bharathipura, this impulse is envisaged as the incipience
of brotherhood between would-be reformer and the putative subject of his
reform, even if seemingly it has to be forged on the problematic grounds of
shared male sexual desire for the upper-caste woman. Jagannatha sees the
untouchables as people to be educated and converted to be like himself, in
both outward form and inner compulsion.17 Anantha Murthy’s understand-
ing of caste as an intimate form of social relationship within the ambience of
a southern agrarian small town, perhaps also his location within a Kannada
literary tradition which, as Nagaraj points out, has long been interested in
exploring the tension between a revolutionary vanguard and the masses,
allows him to frame the question of caste relations in more complex ways
than many other left radical (and similarly Brahmin-authored), or liberal-hu-
manist texts.18 He does this mainly by stressing the affect-laden dimensions

of the relationship in actual situations of social crises. In general, the novel
form tends to reduce politics to the liberal contours of interpersonal rela-
tions. Anantha Murthy’s interest in the dynamics of social transformation in
this novel is therefore exceptional. The position taken in Bharathipura is that
an elite-led modern, rational, secular impetus for change that stems from the
belief that everyone wants the same thing, is—therefore—democratic.
In conclusion, I turn to the strategic aspects of caste mobilization as envis-
aged in Bharathipura. These must be viewed in both continuation of and
contrast to the predominantly ethical issues that Jagannatha’s leadership has
brought to the discussion so far. The distinction between the “strategic” and
the “ethical” is an admittedly imprecise one that I take recourse to here as a
heuristic in order to understand specific historical conjunctures. Where soli-
darities are forged across social division—as in times of revolutionary class
struggle, during anti-colonial liberation struggles, or in contemporary civil
society “new” social movements—it is common to fi nd that leadership is taken
over by a “vanguard,” either in the form of the Party or in the person of an
individual of the traditional ruling class. Such leadership can be “strategic”
only if it is provisional and coalitional in nature. Gramsci’s understanding
of the necessary alliance of intellectuals and masses (the people-nation) has
been expressed in The Prison Notebooks as the complementarity of the “knowl-
edge” that the one possesses to the “feeling” that characterizes the other:
One cannot make politics-history without . . . this sentimental connec-

tion between intellectuals and people-nation . . . If the relationship be-
tween intellectuals and people-nation, between the leaders and the led,
the rulers and the ruled, is provided by an organic cohesion in which
feeling-passion becomes understanding and thence knowledge (not me-
chanically but in a way that is alive), then and only then is the relation-
ship one of representation. (SPNB 418)
While Gramsci sees the leadership of intellectuals as essential for the suc-
cess of a subaltern revolutionary movement, it is important not to conflate
these intellectuals with the middle class as such, as is the case in Fanon’s
analysis. The “intellectuals” Gramsci has in mind are not, or are not in the
fi rst place, “traditional” intellectuals or intellectuals of the ruling class, but
rather those who emerge “organically” from within the group itself. Gramsci
is more interested in the formation of “homogeneous, compact social blocs,
which will give birth to their own intellectuals, their own commandos, their
own vanguard” (SPNB 205; emphasis added).19 His position is developed
through historical analysis and is primarily related to considerations of the
organization of the Communist party in Italy, not formulated as an abstract
ethical issue for the academic to ponder (SPNB 202–05, 310).
Therefore for Gramsci the key distinction would be between “intellectual
elites separated from the masses” and those “conscious of being linked organi-
cally to a national-popular mass” (SPNB 204). Only the latter counts as the
organic intellectual. The question if applied to Bharathipura would be whether
Jagannatha succeeds in “shedding the false heroisms and pseudo-aristocra-
cies” that for Gramsci characterizes the déclassé or nomadic (in other words,
dilettantish) intellectual who enters the political fray (SPNB 204).20 Jagan-
natha’s caste identity as a Brahmin marks him as intellectual by tradition,
an identity further reinforced by his modern education. His voluntary, exis-
tentially mandated entry into social activism in his native Bharathipura is by
itself of course no guarantee of Gramscian organicity (or “authenticity” as it is
termed in the novel). What matters is that despite his long stay abroad in Eng-
land and the modernity toward which he ideologically leans, Jagannatha is no
outsider to the region, nor is he alienated from its people and politics. Instead
he cultivates a unique double perspective, which is also a source of confl ict
(the mark of the postcolonial intellectual). In his introduction to Bharathipura
Nagaraj has made it a point to draw attention to Anantha Murthy’s own famil-
iarity with locality, his intimate connection to place, and his political activism
and commitment, which are similar to Jagannatha’s in the novel.
Gayatri Spivak’s clarification that “organic intellectual is not a concept of
identity but a . . . function,” can help us to understand how the move into
organicity is made from both sides, the subaltern’s as well as the intellectual’s.
She reminds us that “the word ‘class’ loses its lineaments” in Gramsci’s defi ni-
tion of organic intellectuals in terms of a formation that is to be found in every
class (“Translator’s Preface” 209). The leadership of intellectuals, we noted,
would have to be provisional and coalitional. Obviously there is a sense of
temporality operative in judging the legitimacy and effectiveness of the role
played by the “voluntary” leader in subaltern movements: just as there is a
period when particular groups will need the support of leaders, the time will
also come when the latter’s uses will cease and their presence will become
irksome. A Brahmin-led caste movement today would not only be highly
unlikely but also far more politically problematic than in the rural Karna-
taka of the 1960s in which Bharathipura is set. To recognize and acknowledge
subaltern autonomy—and announce its own demise at the precise point of its
attainment—is the Gramscian task of the historical vanguard.
Indira Parthasarathy’s Legend of Nandan, to which I shall now turn, pres-
ents us with a different phenomenon: the emergence of the organic intellec-
tual from within his own social group. While sidestepping questions about
“authenticity,” the play reveals how his leadership is nevertheless fraught with
contradictions and existential pain. And the specter of failure haunts both
works, a matter for the concluding discussion.
The Legend of Nandan

Published not long after Bharathipura, The Legend of Nandan (Nandan Kathai
in Tamil, 1978) is a more overtly polemical text about caste politics in south-
ern India.21 In this play Indira Parthasarathy, an established Delhi-based
Tamil scholar, dramatist and novelist associated with a broad left radical
political activism, rewrites the seventh-century figure of an untouchable field
laborer, Nandan, who has been transformed into a saint and is celebrated in
the legend and myth of the Tamil country for his bhakti (religious devotion).
Parthasarathy seeks to expose in this sharp, swift-paced, explosive drama
the ploy of the upper castes to halt Nandan’s rise as a caste leader by plotting
his death.22
This version of the legend has wide currency to this day and Nandanar,
as he is known, is a venerated saint in the canon of Tamil bhakti figures. In
the nineteenth century the story was revised by the poet Gopala Krishna
Bharati, and made to serve as a pointed critique of Brahminism, which Indira
Parthasarathy further sharpens in his own revisionary work. Parthasarathy
makes clear at the outset in an Author’s note, that he will refer to his hero as
plain “Nandan,” forswearing the widespread form “Nandanaar” because the
“‘—aar’ is not an honorific but a cross to bear” (2). He thereby makes clear
his refusal of the ideological and instrumental elevation of the untouchable
into sainthood. The play exposes the Brahmin conspiracy to destroy Nandan
and quell the untouchables under his leadership. More ambitiously, Indira
Parthasarathy’s robust Marxist demystification of the meaning of Nandan’s
life is meant to contest the upper-castes’ historical victory in establishing
the “legend” of Nandan in their own chosen terms, that is in terms of his
transcendent religious devotion alone, an emphasis which ignores his tragic
death and their own role in bringing it about.
Parthasarathy’s interest in the play is divided between showing the sin-
gular development of Nandan’s consciousness as a lover of Beauty and the
devious cunning of Brahmins and other upper-castes (merchants, land-
lords) who plot his downfall. Nandan worships the beauty of God (who
is a Brahmin God), the arts, music and dance through which this God’s
greatness is celebrated, and the beauty of (a) woman, the temple dancer,
who represents all of these. His desire is invested with the kind of political
force that Jagannatha had intuited was necessary for the awakening of dalit
consciousness in Bharatipura. His constant reiteration of what constitutes the
“human”—significantly, in terms of the experience of the aesthetics of plea-
sure, desire and transcendence—leads Nandan to criticize the untouchables’
life-world and propels him into a romantic and ideological alliance with the
dancer, Abhirami. Not content with self-reformation, in the characteristic
way of the organic intellectual he seeks to persuade his fellow-pulaiyars (the
untouchable caste of field-laborers) to follow him into the new way of life he
envisages as their salvation.23 (Note that this detail about pulaiyar mobiliza-
tion under Nandan’s leadership is Parthasarathy’s own contribution to the
historical account.) At this point the upper castes step in to manipulate both
Nandan’s newly enlarged sphere of consciousness and his growing constitu-
ency. It is they who bring him into proximity with Abhirami so as to arouse
envy among his fellow pulaiyars; they who divide him from his community
and its norms; who convince him of dreams, voices, and visions purport-
edly coming from God himself; deceive him with manufactured miracles;
and endow him with dubious religious powers. And fi nally it is they who
persuade him to walk into the purificatory ritual fi re with Abhirami as a
way of cleansing himself of the dross of his caste-being and achieve rebirth.
The play ends with the sound of the victims’ “non-human wails” as they
burn. Even as the Vediyar exclaims on the “wonder” of their martyrdom,
the Udaiyar asks the watching crowd, “Are there any more paraiyans who
desire to become paarpaans? . . . come, come! If you take a dip in the fi re
. . .” (ellipses in original). The concluding stage directions: “Exit the parai-
yans running for their dear lives” (49).
Parthasarathy admittedly uses exposé as the blunt weapon of demystifica-
tion. The play is not without its contradictions and ambivalences, however: it
conveys as well more profound complexities about the nature of individual
and collective social resistance. Critics of the play were quick to note, for
instance, the writer’s uncertainty about how to develop Nandan’s character.
C.T. Indra cites the Tamil critic Uthirapathi who observed that “while in
the beginning he [Nandan] is seen as governed by the reason and thinking
that marks any ideologue, he later rather naively succumbs to the ploy of the
upper castes and accepts the commands of an allegedly astral voice which
is heard by some of the characters” (xix). There is a suggestion all the same
that Nandan is never entirely taken in by the status transformation he under-
goes, but is instead overwhelmed and overpowered by the public image he
has to live up to—which of course, only makes him even more the puppet of
the Brahmins who fi rst created and then exploited the image.
An extension of the characterological question leads to the central and
unresolved dilemma of the play: how to expose the Brahmins without simul-
taneously reducing Nandan’s status to that of a simpleton and dupe. The divi-
sion in the representation of Nandan between autonomous, even subversive
intellectual development and leadership, on the one hand, and his victim-
hood and defeat at the hands of his caste enemies, on the other, is symptom
of this deeper aporia. Nandan is the celebrated untouchable subject of bhakti
in the medieval literary tradition. When he is rescued from that apotheo-
sized representation it is only to be revealed as dupe and victim—the mere
object—of Brahmin conspiracy. The mainspring of Nandan’s agency lies in his
caste-transcendent bhakti. By making Brahmin manipulation rather than this
autonomous devotion the cause of his death, Parthasarathy undermines Nan-
dan’s agential motivation and initiative. The untouchable devotee becomes
primarily a bone of contention between opposed literary-political interpreta-
tions. Whether the point that Parathasarathy is attempting to make is that
religion itself—all religion—is a delusion, or whether he means to suggest that
Nandan’s coming under its sway as an untouchable intellectual, is a political
error: in either case he cannot allow Nandan’s death to be meaningful. In

attempting to re-code religious martyrdom as secular tragedy, he reduces
it to near-farce. The representation of hegemony’s operations (representation
functioning here as literal disclosure) is not sufficient to strip it of its potency.
On the contrary, it ends by reproducing and reinforcing it.
Unable to deny that it is Nandan’s religious aspirations which are as much
transgressive as they are conservative, that constitute his exceptional char-
acter and his organicity, Indira Parthasarathy arrives at a creative solution:
he resorts to the aestheticization of Brahmin ritual as a way of sidestepping a
direct address to the question of Nandan’s religiosity. 24 Nandan is thus able
to identify himself as simply “a slave of beauty.” When Abhirami presses him
to explain “whose beauty,” he replies, “You, your dance, and the deity you
worship” (Parthasarathy 8). It is in effect his appreciation of beauty, sensu-
ous rather than spiritual in nature, that is displaced on to religion. Nor is this
necessarily only an ideological maneuver on the writer’s part. The arts, archi-
tecture, music and dance of the medieval period were so comprehensively
performed in the service of the temple that it would have been impossible to
separate the aesthetic from the religious in any clear-cut way (arguably this
is still true of much traditional Indian culture). Nandan’s religious fervor and
his aesthetic passion are fused. It is his fervent expressions of religio-aesthetic
sensibility that give us access to his interiority, where his poignant love of
beauty and aspiration for a better life is revealed.
The religio-aesthetic domain to which Nandan turns is, however, inexora-
bly caste-marked, dominated as it is by a monopolistic Brahmin high culture.
The playwright himself succumbs to the lure of Brahminical culture by copi-
ously reproducing it in the play in the songs Nandan sings, the dances Abhi-
rami performs, and the images of the dancing Nataraja that are reproduced
in the sets on stage. Not that the author is oblivious to the reality that culture
is a contested political terrain in caste struggles, so much so that he includes a
(somewhat gratuitous) scene in which the Brahmins propose and stage a con-
test between “our” dance, Bharatanatyam (the highly evolved temple dance
performed by Abhirami) and “their” dance, koothu (the vigorous folk dance
of the paraiyans). The contest ends by reinforcing the superiority of Brahmin
culture (for the audience in the theatre we can’t help noting, as much as the
audience on stage); while at the same time it also demonstrates Nandan’s
alienation from his own people.
Moving on to another aspect of the organic intellectual—whose “mode of
being” as famously described by Gramsci would consist in “active participa-
tion in practical life, as constructor, organiser, ‘permanent persuader’ and
not just a simple orator,” and who thereby becomes “‘directive’ (specialized
and political)”— Parthasarathy’s reading of the legend highlights the social
disturbance that Nandan’s aspirations provoke (SPNB 10). Therefore the
play shows not only Nandan’s individual hubris that the Brahmins set out
to check, but also the beginnings of collective unrest. His mobilization of
the puliyars is not limited to being a cultural movement. It has its material
aspects as reflected in agricultural labor and class relations. The landlord
and merchant upper castes in the play are profoundly worried about the
neglect of the harvest and other menial tasks that the pulaiyars and paraiyars
are exclusively assigned to do, according to a permanently entrenched divi-
sion of labor. Equally, the untouchables opposed to Nandan fear the loss of
their wages and punishment by the masters. While caste is not reducible to
class, the class aspect of caste formation cannot be long overlooked. 25
At the play’s opening, the four vediyars (brahminical Vedic scholars,
priests) assemble to discuss Nandan’s threat in a series of quick exchanges:
Nandan is carrying on a “campaign” among the pulaiyars; he is “trying to
turn the paraccheri (untouchable neighborhood) into an agraharam (Brahmin
neighborhood)”; he advises the people “to give up the paraiya God” and
embrace “the paarpaara God” (6). What does Nandan’s campaign entail?
“I am bringing around the folks of my cheri to my way of thinking. I shall
bring a few of them [to the temple] . . . those who wallow in squalor wor-
shipping the palla deity should know what a paarpaara deity is like,” he tells
Abhirami (10). He is angry with his people for indulging in mere drinking,
dancing and eating, and for the mindless labor they perform. In argument
with them, he denies that caste is “a loss which one suffers at birth.” “No,
it’s a law made by the rich.” It is a thing of the mind, “Half of it is just what
the upper castes say. The rest of it is what we think ourselves.” He speaks to
them of “Beauty,” which consists of “being human”: “we’re beasts, we must
become human” (12).
The play consequently shows untouchable life as brutal and bestial. Nev-
ertheless, even in the face of such a representation, the paraiyas are able to
defend their way of life with arguments built on a powerful sense of auton-
omy, coupled with a critique of Brahminical life. Nandan’s own repudiation
of his stigmatized culture, origins and people, and his desire for the “other,”
remain unalterable. It is seemingly the tragic price the untouchable intellec-
tual pays for his caste-consciousness. D. R. Nagaraj observes how frequently
“the birth of the modern individual in the humiliated communities is not
only accompanied by a painful severing of ties with the community, but also
a conscious effort to alter one’s past is an integral part of it” (7–8).26 Here
Indira Parthasarathy stages one of the central debates relating to modern
dalit cultural politics. Nandan is one in a long line of caste leaders, dalit as
well as savarna (upper caste), who have propagated the reform of untouch-
able customs and manners so total as to threaten to undermine dalit identity
itself.27 That there are serious and long-lasting implications to this reformist
pedagogy has since come to be recognized.28 Interestingly however, the pos-
sibility of such self-alienation is not an eventuality that Gramsci takes cogni-
zance of in urging the emergence of the organic intellectual into leadership.
In the teleology of history we do often fi nd that in the liberatory move-
ments of stigmatized groups self-transformation and radical reform precede
self-acceptance and the demand for recognition. It is to this earlier stage of

untouchable politics that Nandan belongs. It is an approach not unlike that
of dalit leaders, like Ambedkar, whose emphasis on organizational strat-
egy and social transformation we may plausibly describe as Gramscian, in
marked divergence from the kind of respect for dalit “difference” that is
recommended by Indian subaltern historians like Dipesh Chakrabarty in an
avowedly Heideggerian mode, and different also from the “recognition” that
is demanded by contemporary dalit intellectuals. Timothy Brennan insists
vehemently on the need to mark Gramsci’s political agenda as distinct from
the Heideggerian ontology subscribed to by the subalternists, as follows:
Having no desire to “give voice” to the essential wisdom of the subaltern,

or glorify subalternity as such, Gramsci repeatedly made clear in his
writing the need for the training and discipline provided by education,
“national-popular” literature, and other practices that would, in essence,
eradicate subalternity. (“Antonio Gramsci and Postcolonial Theory” 166,
170; emphasis added).
Nandan’s failure as leader, beyond strategic considerations, is typically

attributed to the ideological abjectness of his upward caste mobility that,
when it takes the form of imitating upper-caste customs and manners and
is attended by repudiation of indigenous practices, has been described in
Indian caste sociology as “Sanskritization.”29 The Sanskritization theory is
not innocent of “perpetuating the hierarchy it purports to reduce,” as Andrew
Parker observes of Bourdieu’s sociology of class-distinction (xvi). But is Nan-
dan’s passion for the Brahmin God even adequately captured by the Sanskri-
tization thesis? The literary text’s formal insistence on singularity as much as
Indira Parthasarathy’s own investment in endowing Nandan with a complex
psychic interiority, makes his behavior seem both less and more than the
collective social impetus that inspires so-called Sanskritization: less, because
its aesthetic fervor is seen as unique to him rather than typical of his class;
more, because it is directed at a radically egalitarian end, not at conservative
adaptation. We might come closer to understanding Parthasarathy’s Nan-
dan as a Gramscian organic intellectual if we were to understand his thirst
for forbidden education as somewhat analogous to that of Kumud Pawde, a
mahar by caste who became a Sanskrit scholar against all the odds, rather
than as one succumbing to Sanskritization, the sociological process (Pawde
96–106). Needless to say the distance between Sanskritization and the dalit
acquisition of Sanskrit is a vast one. Parthasarathy’s endowment of Nandan
with the attributes of a poet manqué heightens this more radical character-
ization.30 By breaking out of caste-based occupation into an inappropriate
aestheticism and religious devotion Nandan, however limited by the models
of idealized upper-caste life available to him, not only functions as an overt
(if containable) threat to the social order of his times but also unsettles an
influential explanation of the sociology of caste.

We are left, nevertheless, with the indisputable reality that The Legend of
Nandan explicitly marks the historical defeat of the untouchable intellectual
by the successful workings of upper-caste hegemony. How then should we
read subaltern failure—or read this particular reading of subaltern failure—in
political and historical terms? Gramsci for instance concludes from his read-
ing of the Risorgimento that “the history of subaltern groups is necessarily
fragmented and episodic” since their attempts at “unification” are thwarted
by the ruling groups (emphasis added). “Subaltern groups are always subject
to the activity of ruling groups, even when they rebel and rise up: only ‘per-
manent’ victory breaks their subordination, and that not immediately.” This
is what makes it all the more important to record “every trace of independent
initiative on the part of subaltern groups” (SPNB 54–55). Gayatri Spivak was
quick to note that the historical writings of the Subaltern Studies collective
too are invariably “accounts of failures.” It would be a mistake however,
she warns, to correlate subaltern failure to the “level of consciousness” of
the class. The theoretical innovation of subaltern historiography is that the
distinction between success and failure is itself deconstructed (made “inde-
terminate”) in the work of the collective. The “possibility of failure cannot be
derived from any criterion of success unless the latter is a theoretical fiction”
(“Subaltern Studies” 3–34, especially 5–7). The seesaw of interpretations of
Nandan’s subjectivity and actions within the play itself—between hubris and
humiliation, autonomy and false consciousness, resistance and subjection,
agency and victimization—is therefore due in part at least to the difficulties of
deciding subaltern success and failure by established criteria.
From the conventional Marxist point of view that is attributable to the
author himself, the subaltern cast of the play, that is, Nandan, Abhirami,
and the pulaiyars, suffer a defeat that is coded in the traditional language of
class struggle. Historically the conditions of possibility for the emergence of
caste mobilization led by an untouchable cannot be expected to be present
in the eighth century feudal past in which the events take place, a period
marked by increasing Brahmin dominance following the defeat of Bud-
dhist influence in the Tamil country. And as an allegory of the present,
the play’s profound pessimism about organized (agrarian) resistance can
be attributed to the likelihood that Parthasarathy linked his reading of the
fate of the historical Nandan to the brutal retaliation that was carried out
against dalit peasants in Velmani village, and the blatant miscarriage of
justice that had resulted in the acquittal of the landlords responsible for the
killings, only a few years before.
In a return to Gramsci, however, we can read the dominant groups’ resort
to violence against the subaltern/dalit—in both the play and its present-day
context—in symptomatic terms, as an indication of a “crisis of authority.”
“If the ruling class has lost its consensus, i.e. is no longer ‘leading’ but only
‘dominant’, exercising coercive force alone, this means precisely that the
great masses have become detached from their traditional ideologies, and
no longer believe what they used to believe previously etc,” writes Gramsci.
This moment then is an “interregnum,” harboring revolutionary potential
(SPNB 276). Like Gramsci, the two writers I have discussed in this chapter
also read history as a process rather than in terms of a single, defi nitive and
conclusive event. While as literary texts these imaginative reconstructions of
subaltern insurgency may not be able to entirely avoid narrative telos, their
formal open-endedness allows us to glimpse a future beyond the closing
verdict of failure. The reading of these texts as representation of an “inter-
regnum” fi lled with uncertainty and potential is made possible, in my view,
by Gramsci’s analysis of subaltern history.
Notes
1. Anantha Murthy, Bharathipura (1974) translated from Kannada by P. Sreenivasa

Rao (New Delhi: Macmillan India, 1996); Indira Parthasarathy, Nandan Kathai
(1978), in English The Legend of Nandan, translated from Tamil by C. T. Indra
(New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2000). All page references to the Intro-
duction and the English translation are to these editions and are given in paren-
theses within the text.
2. The 1970s in India witnessed India Gandhi’s promulgation of a state of national
emergency, a two-year period (1975–1977) when the democratic state experi-
enced a profound crisis.
3. Pandey offers a perceptive theoretical discussion of this development.
4. Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981) is the locus classicus here. It is of
course the timing of Saleem Sinai’s birth and not his participation in the free-
dom struggle that entitles him to national centrality.
5. Chatterjee is referring to later works of Rajni Kothari such as Politics and the
People: In Search of a Humane Idea.
6. Gramsci gives the name of “volunteers” to those individuals who “have detached
themselves from the mass [i.e., their own class] by arbitrary individual initiative,
and who often stand in opposition to that mass or are neutral with respect to it”
(SPNB 203).
7. But Marxism must also be the “antithesis” of the Church in that a Marxist orga-
nization, unlike the Catholic Church, cannot leave the masses content in their
common sense but will seek to lead them instead towards a “higher conception
of life” (SPNB 332).
8. On the Lutheran Reformation and Calvinism constituting a “vast national-
popular movement” in Europe, especially in Germany (but not in Italy), see
SPNB 394ff.
9. The religious politics of caste is summed up in Ambedkar’s forceful anti-Hindu
argument in favor of conversion: “I had the misfortune of being born with the
stigma of an untouchable but will not die a Hindu for this is in my power” (B.
R. Ambedkar, Bombay Chronicle, October 16, 1935; cited in Rao 118).
10. I have drawn on Prithvi Datta Chandra Shobhi’s Introduction to D. R. Nagaraj,
The Flaming Feet and Other Essays: The Dalit Movement in India for this abbrevi-
ated account of the Kannada cultural scene in the 1970s.

11. Anantha Murthy in his Samvatsar lecture at the Sahitya Akademi, “Five Decades
of My Writing.” Bruno Latour has used Jagannatha to serve as an example of the
kind of iconoclast whose action he reads as reductively secular and impoverishing:
“The fetish gains strength in the hands of anti-fetishists . . . Neither the aunt nor the
priest considered the saligram as anything but a mere stone. Never.” See Latour
270–71, cited in Srikanth Mallavarapu and Amit Prasad, “Facts, Fetishes and the
Parliament of Things.” In a fine critique of Latour’s reading of the episode, Mal-
lavarapu and Prasad have deplored Latour’s failure to contextualize the episode
within the book, as also his ignorance of the “position the stone occupies (and has
occupied for centuries) in a network of caste hierarchies that the priest and the aunt
operate in” (194), and his larger disregard of the complex career of modernity’s
“mediations and translations” in the non-West (192).
12. The influence of European existentialist philosophy on Anantha Murthy’s fic-
tion of the 1960s and 1970s has been remarked upon frequently, criticized as
both derivative and unsuited to his “Indian” subject matter. In Bharathipura,
however, Jagannatha appears to invoke the philosophical language of existen-
tialism deliberately, in the conviction that his search for “authenticity” consti-
tutes a stronger ethical motive than liberalism. His “experiment” would involve
“some cruelty,” he realizes; the untouchables must be “assaulted.” “But could he,
a polite liberal, mount this assault?” (Bharathipura 137). Ultimately Jagannatha
can be convicted of many things, but not of inauthenticity—or liberalism.
13. Gramsci is indebted to Marx’s analysis of the psychology of small peasant pro-
prietors in The Eighteenth Brumaire where the diagnosis of the division between
their class identity and their class consciousness/interest leads to the famous pro-
nouncement that “they cannot represent themselves; they must be represented.”
“Antonio Gramsci’s work on the ‘subaltern classes’ extends the class-position/
class-consciousness argument isolated in The Eighteenth Brumaire,” observes Spi-
vak (“Can the Subaltern Speak?’” 271–313, especially 283).
14. “The proletariat can become the leading [dirigente] and the dominant class to
the extent that it creates a system of class alliances which allows it to mobilize
the majority of the working population against capitalism and the bourgeois
state” (‘Some Aspects of the Southern Question,’ in Forgacs, Gramsci Reader,
173). In “Southern Question,” as is well known, Gramsci urges the alliance of
the northern proletarian factory-worker with the peasant in the South.
15. The phrase is Marcus Green’s, “Gramsci Cannot Speak” (88). Gramsci, Green
elaborates, was interested in “the integral relationship between their [subalterns’]
economic, political, and social positions; the stages of their development in his-
tory; their significance in cultural forms; how they are represented in literature;
and so forth.”
16. Anantha Murthy writes in an essay, “Haven’t I become what I am by demythify-
ing, even desecrating, the world of my childhood? As a boy growing up in my
village, didn’t I urinate stealthily and secretly on sacred stones under trees to
prove to myself that they have no power over me?” in “Why not Worship in the
Nude?” (Omnibus 332).
17. Dress, for example, is an important marker of untouchable difference which
Jagannatha tries to remove by giving the men clothes (and soap). “They were
just like the clothes he wore. They had to look like members of his own class—
pockets, collars, half-sleeves, dhotis with borders” (Omnibus 230). He instructs

them on how to wear the dhotis, whole, to reach the feet. “You should walk like
me in the market place, without fear or shame” (232).
18. Examples of the fi rst kind would be Indira Parthasarathy’s Legend of Nandan,
which I discuss next, and of the second, Arundhati Roy’s God of Small Things
(1997).
19. Gramsci mocks the “rhetorical heroism” of the language of “vanguards” and
“commandos” when these entities are isolated from the political party (204).
20. Note the anxiety about “heroism” expressed by both Gramsci and Fanon, which
anticipates the “intense mistrust of super-revolutionaries” (alongside a “subtle
endorsement of the political wisdom of the masses”) that Nagaraj identifies in
the tradition of the Kannada novel to which Bharathipura belongs (viii).
21. C.T. Indra’s English translation bearing the title The Legend of Nandan appeared
in 2003 (Oxford University Press), together with an introduction, a critical essay
and elaborate textual apparatus all provided by her. I am greatly indebted to
the information provided in this scholarly edition.
22. All upper castes are here referred to as “paarpaan” (meaning “seer”) in the play,
a term more commonly used to signify Brahmins alone.
23. On this see Gramsci: “[A]ny cultural movement which aimed to replace com-
mon sense and old conceptions of the world in general’ would require the lead-
ership of ‘intellectuals of a new type which arise directly out of the masses, but
remain in contact with them to become, as it were, the whalebone in the corset”
(SPNB 340).
24. C. T. Indra considers this equation of Nandan’s religious sense with his aes-
thetic sense a “self-imposed limitation in the playwright’s conception of Nan-
dan” (xviii).
25. Note that Parthasarathy gives specific occupational caste names to identify
different groups of the untouchable community as is customary in actual
practice.
26. Cited in Pandian 16.
27. For example, Narayana Guru, Gandhi, Ambedkar. As we saw this empha-
sis on untouchable dress and comportment is stressed by Jagannatha also in
Bharathipura.
28. In The Flaming Feet D. R. Nagaraj rehearses some of the debates among dalit
intellectuals on the question of preserving or abandoning their culture and cus-
toms in a chapter titled “The Problem of Cultural Memory.” See also U. R. Anan-
tha Murthy’s essay, “Why Not Worship in the Nude?” for a similar debate.
29. M. N. Srinivas is credited with the term and the theory of “Sanskritization” in
Social Change in Modern India.
30. Writing about the French working-class poor of the 1830s, Jacques Ranciere is
struck by their “transgressive will to appropriate the ‘night’ of poets and think-
ers, to appropriate the language and culture of the other, to act as if intellectual
equality were indeed real and effectual” (219).
I am grateful to all those who read various drafts of this essay and offered
their comments and suggestions, especially the editors of this volume, and
Toral Gajarawala, You-me Park, and Kaushik Sunder Rajan.
9 Mariátegui and Gramsci in
“Latin” America
Between Revolution and Decoloniality 1
Walter D. Mignolo
Introduction
For this volume I was asked for a contribution on Antonio Gramsci in
Latin America. To focus on Gramsci without examining the intellectual
and political environment in which he was translated, read, used and
discussed would be a sort of anti-Gramscian endeavor. As I understand it,
Gramsci would have not written about Lenin in Italy without examining
the situation in Italy that may have or have not made Lenin relevant. In
that regard, and for reasons that will be clarified in the following pages,
it is necessary to start by examining in parallel and in contrast both Peru-
vian José Carlos Mariátegui (1894–1930) and Sardinian Antonio Gramsci
(1891–1937). The two great thinkers have been placed in relation several
times. The general tendency is to underline the influences of Gramsci on
Mariátegui. There are a few who have doubts about it, although they do
not radically contest the idea. The assumption here is that Gramsci could
have influenced Mariátegui; never that Mariátegui could have influenced
Gramsci. And the underlying presupposition under the assumptions is
that “influence” goes from the center to the periphery of the modern/
colonial world, never the other way around. I will come back to this issue.
In the meantime, I invite you to think about it: they were almost the same
age, three years difference. When Mariátegui was in Italy, he was about
twenty-four and Gramsci was twenty-seven.
Gramsci was very influential in Argentina and Brazil (particularly since
1960).2 The young Marxist generation found in Gramsci’s writing a breath
of fresh air and the opportunity to break away from the institutional Marx-
ism-Leninism that emanated from Moscow. Later on we found Gramsci in
México (because of the Argentine émigrés in the mid-1970s) and his impact
can be traced today in several places and disciplines. But it is obvious and
necessary to remember, Gramsci was influential within Marxism mainly. For
the contemporary debates in Latin America of the 1960s, like dependency
theory, philosophy of liberation and Indianism (as voiced by Bolivian Fausto
Reinaga), Gramsci was not a necessary reference.
192 Walter D. Mignolo
At the beginning of the 1970s in Argentina the military dictatorship ended
and the path toward democracy opened up; in the mid-1980s, the émigrés
to México returned to the country—and with them Gramsci. The historical
situation has changed radically in relation to the conditions that in the 1960s
and the 1970s made Gramsci necessary for certain sectors of the left. This
volume focuses also on Gramsci and the postcolonial. And Gramsci and
the postcolonial in “Latin” America is an empty category. Consequently, I
will slightly deviate from the topic and address instead “Gramsci and the
decolonial,” and will be putting Gramsci in conversation with the decolo-
nial in South/Central America and the Caribbean, a sphere of political and
epistemic debate in which Gramsci was not influential.

“Colonialism” is common to both projects, post- and decolonial. But while
decolonial thinking originated under colonial rule in Indias Occidentales
and the Caribbean, for postcolonial scholars the Enlightenment is a point of
reference of colonialism and modernity and the independence of Asian and
African countries after the Second World War is the marker of postcoloni-
ality.3 Understandably so, because the experience upon which postcolonial
studies and theory emerged was that of the second wave of Western expan-
sion (England and France in Asia and Africa), while “decolonial” goes back
to the historical foundation of “coloniality” (the logic underlying different
historical and special imperial/colonial formations) during the formation of
the Atlantic commercial circuits in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries
(Spain and Portugal in America and the Caribbean).
Gramsci was introduced by the “Latin” American left in the early 1960s.
He was not a key figure either for Afro-Caribbean and Afro-Continental
intellectuals or for Indigenous intellectuals. In that context, Gramsci was
not related at all with any issues regarding “colonialism.” He was fi rst a
helpful thinker for local Argentinian and Brazilian left-wing intellectuals to
detach themselves from the bureaucracy of the Communist Party and, later
on, to enter in the debate about the “State” when the failed project of “mod-
ernization and development” (addressed by dependency theory) mutated
into “transition to democracy” and the State became the main actor of a
new melodrama.
In fact, at the beginning of the 1970s, theories on democracy in Latin
America began to emerge and they become dominant in the 1980s. “Transi-
tion to democracy” was the key expression. The Gramscian left coexisted
with the rehearsal of liberal discourses in the ex- colonies, with dependency
theory and with theology of liberation.4
The failed project of modernity and development collapsed between the
“global 68” (from Beijing to Mexico, Paris and Prague) and the fi rst oil crisis
of the early 1970s. The fi rst attempt of the neo-liberal project was Chile right
after the fall of Salvador Allende and that initiated the dictatorship of Augusto
Pinochet in 1973. Shortly after that, economic dependency theory went out of
business: Milton Friedman was the new intellectual leader, dictatorship ruled
Mariátegui and Gramsci in “Latin” America 193
Chile and Argentina. The “transition to democracy” became the main topic
of debates for liberal and Marxist thinkers in the mid-1980s and early 1990s.
Gramsci’s influence began to recede in the political arena, but remained in
the libraries of progressive intellectuals.
Before the 1980s and the displacement of the debate to the “transition to
democracy” the left in Argentina and Mexico5 was divided between the sup-
porters of Louis Pierre Althusser and Nicos Poulantzas, on the one hand, and
the followers of Gramsci, on the other. In Bolivia, it was the period in which
Zavaleta Mercado was still relying on Gramsci but at the same time heavily
focused on the colonial history of Bolivia that, a few years later, led him to
abandon Gramsci and concentrate on theorizing from the history of Bolivia

rather than from the debates in the Communist Party. In all of these debates,
colonialism in Argentina and Brazil was out of the question. The idea that
colonialism ended mostly in the fi rst half of the nineteenth century with the
independence from Spain (and later on Portugal) was taken for granted.
During the years (early 1970s) that Gramsci was occupying certain quarters,
in another country, in México, two influential sociologists—Pablo González
Casanova and Rodolfo Stavenhagen—introduced the concept of “internal
colonialism.” It was a departure from strictly Marxist debates where Gramsci
had entered in Latin America. One could say that the Southern Question
was a situation explained through the concept of internal colonialism. The
concept did not come from Gramsci. It originated in México. But the Latin
Marxist left was oblivious to this concept. Internal colonialism was already
a forerunner of coloniality: the independences (and the revolution in the US,
and decolonization in Africa by the 1970s) did not end coloniality. It was a
restructuring: the “native” elites managed the newborn countries and the
“imperial” elites continue to manage international law and relations and the
capitalist market.
Coloniality (without being named as such yet, but the imperial/colonial
logic being already unveiled) was alive and well in Bolivia through the work of
Aymara intellectual Fausto Reinaga and very present in the work of the brilliant
non-indigenous intellectual René Zavaleta Mercado (1935–1984). Not surpris-
ingly and judging by their works, there was no communication between them.
Scholars who explored Zavaleta Mercado’s work distinguished three periods
in his influential production: the first period devoted to the national question
(shortly after the Bolivian revolution of 1952); the period of Marxist orthodoxy,
that included his reading of Gramsci’s work (the period in which Gramsci was
being read in South America), and the final period in which the history and
present of Bolivia become central to his thought and he found the limit of Marx-
ist thinking. It was in this period that the concept of “motley society” emerged.
In this period Zavaleta Mercado approaches the attitude and the faith of José
Carlos Mariátegui. Not by influence but by the sheer courage of thinking on
their own and not from concepts that had been forged in England to account for
the condition of the Industrial Revolution that Marx was witnessing or under
the conditions in Italy during the 1920s, in which Gramsci was immersed.6 The
geopolitics of knowledge and the biographic epistemic foundations emerge here
in full, debunking the pretense of a universal epistemology that dominates the
world from the top of the hill, even if that hill is the South of Italy being appro-
priated by the postcolonial market.
Revisiting Mariátegui and Gramsci

The most obvious beginning to deal with Sardinian Gramsci in relation to the
decolonial is to look at him in tandem with Peruvian José Carlos Mariátegui.
Gramsci and Mariátegui run parallel lives. Although “influences” of the former
on the latter have been suggested, as I just mentioned, it is quite unlikely, unless
the precocity of Gramsci’s writing met the precocity and voracity of Mariáteg-
ui’s reading habits. Mariátegui was well acquainted with Marxists of Eastern
Europe (Rosa Luxembourg [1871–1919], George Luckàcs [1885–1991] and with
Antonio Labriola [1843–1904]), but Gramsci seems to have been as unknown to
Mariátegui as Mariátegui to Gramsci. Or they probably met when Mariátegui
was in Italy, but there is no correspondence that will tell us that the meeting was
the flashing light for Mariátegui or that Gramsci noticed the similar concerns
in this young Peruvian intellectual. The influence of Gramsci in Mariátegui
seems to be more the wishful thinking of Mariátegui’s followers than a his-
torically documented event. What is undeniably true is that both Gramsci and
Mariátegui were facing and living in a similar “colonial” situation: the internal
colonialism in the history of Southern Italy and the external colonialism in the
history of the Andean region (Perú, Bolivia, Ecuador).
Gramsci presented the dilemma of the “Southern Question” in free indi-
rect style and faced the Southern subaltern with two options: either be with
the local elite or with the workers of the mainland. The “colonial question”
was connected to the “industrial question” Gramsci reports addressing an
audience in these terms:
The dilemma: Are you, poor Sardinian devils, are you for a bloc with
the gentry of Sardegna, who have ruined you and who are the local over-
seers of capitalist exploitation? Or are you for a bloc with the revolution-
ary workers on the mainland, who stand for the abolition of exploitation
and emancipation of all who are oppressed? This dilemma was rammed
into the head of those present. (The Southern Question 38)
For Mariátegui, the dilemma was the long-lasting colonial legacies in South
America and the peculiarity of not having a bourgeoisie and, therefore, a
proper working class in the sense Gramsci was talking about:
The agrarian problem is first and foremost the problem of eliminating feu-
dalism in Peru, which should have been done by the democratic-bourgeois
regime that followed the War of Independence. But in its one hundred years
as a republic, Peru has not had a genuine bourgeois class, a true capitalist
class. The old feudal class—camouflaged or disguised as a republican bour-
geoisie—has kept its position. The policy of disentitlement, initiated by the
War of Independence as a logical consequence of its ideology, did not lead
to the development of small property. The old landholding class had not
lost its supremacy. The survival of the latifundistas, in practice, preserved
the latifundium. Disentailment struck at the Indian community. During a
century of Republican rule, great agricultural property actually has grown
stronger and expanded, despite the theoretical liberalism of our constitution
and the practical necessities of the development of our capitalist economy.

(Seven Interpretative Essays 41)
In sum, the colonial conditions of the rural South and of the industrial North
are quite different from the colonial conditions of the ex-colonies in South
America, where there is no equivalent to the Italian industrial North.
Once in a lecture I mentioned this topic, I was asked during the Q&A
period what I thought about the fact that Gramsci may have suffered more in
prison under fascism than Mariátegui under internal colonialism. I politely
responded that it was a moot point from a political perspective. It may be
important in a discussion about Christian institutional morality (not even for
Theology of Liberation). The problem is of course not who suffered more (for
indigenous and enslaved Africans and their descendants in the New World
suffered more than Gramsci and Mariàtegui together), but that Gramsci was
in prison because of Fascism and Mariàtegui because of internal colonialism
and his confrontation with the dictatorship of Augusto B. Leguía. The prob-
lem is that you cannot expect to solve Peruvian problems based on Gramsci
suffering more under Fascism than Mariátegui under internal colonialism
and Leguía´s dictatorship during his early years of critical journalism. The
problem of the question was the presupposition of one single story. Let’s
take two paragraphs to illuminate the point I am trying to make. The fi rst
deals with the Southern Question and the other with the indigenous prob-
lem. For Gramsci, “The question in Italy is historically determined,” it is not
the “peasant and agrarian question in general.” In Italy, the peasant question
has, given its specific Italian tradition, assumed two particular typical and
peculiar forms, the Southern question and the Vatican question (Gramsci,
The Southern Question 32). For Mariátegui, instead, the assumption that the
Indian problem is ethnic is sustained by the most outmoded repertory of
imperialist ideas.
The concept of inferior races was useful to the white man’s West for
purposes of expansion and conquest. To expect that the Indian will be
emancipated through a steady crossing of the aboriginal race with white
immigrants is an anti-sociological naiveté that could only occur to the
primitive mentality of an importer of merino sheep . . . The degenera-
tion of the Peruvian Indian is a cheap invention of the sophists who serve
feudal interests (Mariátegui, Seven Interpretative Essays 25).
Mariátegui has laid out in his treatment of the “Indian Question” the
epistemic and political foundation of the project modernity/(de)colonial-
ity, which is the perspective that nourished these pages. I am not just
reporting on Gramsci in “Latin” America from a neutral disciplinary per-
spective, but in dialogue with the adaptation. The point is not Gramsci’s
work but its uses in the Southern Cone. So I am not saying that Gramsci
is Eurocentric. He is just Italian. His adaptation in South and Central

America was a manifestation of the Eurocentered left that, at that point,
found in Gramsci a support for their need to detach from the Communist
Party. And about that, I have obviously no objection. I am just being
careful not to make Gramsci the last postcolonial gadget in outre-mer.
Gramsci of course was not Eurocentrist, he was European; Eurocentrics
were rather the Latin American left that introduced Gramsci in Latin
America and turned their back to the emergent movement of a parallel
critical left that was doing what Gramsci did in Italy: thinking from their
own histories and experiences.
As you can see Gramsci’s local history and Mariátegui’s local history are
quite far apart and although they are both walking in the same direction, they
have a necessity to walk parallel roads. To expect that Gramsci would solve
the problems in Peru (or South and Central America and the Caribbean)
would be like expecting Mariátegui to solve the problem of the Southern
Question in Italy. Of course, Mariátegui could have learned from Gramsci
and Gramsci from Mariátegui. But to put one over the other would be to
reproduce coloniality of knowledge from the left. The reason that Gramsci
is better known than Mariátegui is due to the imperial/colonial history of
Western knowledge of which the left has not been exempt. And of course,
this was not Gramsci’s problem for he did what he had to do. It is a problem
of the “uses” of Gramsci, either by the “Latin” American left or by the post-
colonial market today.
In any event, what counts is that Mariátegui and Gramsci were radical
critics grounded in their own geo-historical and bio-graphic formation, con-
fronting the limits of Marxism. Mariátegui was facing the lasting legacy
of Spanish colonialism, plus the more recent colonialism without colonies
(which is just a mutation of coloniality), under British and US economic man-
agement. Here is one of the many paragraphs and pages Mariátegui devoted
to the issue:
There is a chapter in the evolution of the Peruvian economy that opens

with the discovery of guano and nitrates and closes with the loss of
this wealth . . . These materials, on a remote coast in the South Pa-
cific, were essential to the development of European or Western in-
dustrialism. In addition, unlike other Peruvian products they were not
hampered by the rudimentary and primitive state of land transport.
Whereas gold, silver, copper, and coal mined from the Andes had to
be conveyed great distances over rugged mountain ranges, guano and
nitrate deposits lay on the coast within easy reach of the cargo ships.
(Seven Interpretative Essays 33)
Both also were facing the quarrel between colonial legacies and nation
building (Italy united in 1861 after being torn apart by Spanish, Aus-
trian, and French colonial expansion in Europe; Peru began the process
of nation building in 1821). Mariátegui lived through the second presi-
dency of extreme right-winger Augusto B. Leguía (1919–1930) and Gram-
sci through Benito Mussolini (1925–1943). Both, in their singular local
histories, traced parallel trajectories of epistemic disobedience, indepen-
dent thoughts and decolonial freedom. Although the term “colonialism”
is frequently used in Gramsci’s Notebooks it is not one of his keywords.
Gramsci has been seldom quoted for giving the term “colonialism” a
theoretical meaning, as he is quoted for his concept of “hegemony” and
“subalternity.” “Colonialism” instead is one of Mariátegui’s key concepts.
As a matter of fact, Mariátegui’s use of colonialism is the forerunner of
“coloniality.” “Colonialism” was an historical concern for Gramsci, as it
is clear when he addresses the Southern Question. But Gramsci’s colonial
experience was very different from Mariátegui’s. However, an important
consideration for both of them is that they are thinkers who developed
their thought from their historical and personal experiences rather than
from previous theories.
Both Mariátegui and Gramsci were voracious readers; they knew and
pondered coexisting theories. Because they grounded their theorizing in
their geo- and body-political location they remain exemplary intellectual
guides and they are irreducible to one another. As original thinkers, they
confront theories with phenomena to be accounted for and confronted
existing theories that were derailed in relation to what they were per-
ceiving. Both, in their own local histories and from them, confronted
the limits of Marxist theories of their time as well as many others one
can fi nd in both thinkers. Thus, while Gramsci provided a wealth of
concepts and insights to the renovation of the “Latin” American left of
Marxist persuasion, Mariátegui provided the conditions for the advent
of the concept of coloniality (and hence, decoloniality) introduced by
Peruvian sociologist Aníbal Quijano at the end of the 1980s.7 Decolonial-
ity since that moment meant “epistemic decolonization” and delinking
from Eurocentrism. 8
In a related issue, one of the evaluators of this article noted that Gram-
sci in several opportunities commented on the situation in South America
and on the question of “Latinity.” But in the same fashion, Mariátegui has
countless comments on Europe, on Italy, on the Communist Party, and
so on. However, this article is not about what both authors said about the other
author’s history and location but the uses of Gramsci in South America mainly. For
it would be unfair and totally colonial to only consider what Gramsci has to
say about South America without paying attention to what Mariátegui has
to say about Italy and Europe. It will mean to follow the same self-colonized
logic of the South American and Caribbean intellectuals who put Gramsci
fi rst and Mariátegui second. This article is an effort to shift this colonial
geography of reasoning and to decolonize the epistemic racism implied in
such hierarchy. 9
In his critique to Lamberti Sorrentino’s book Latinitá dell´America,
Gramsci opens the paragraph by asking, “Are Central and South America
Latin?”; he is asking the question to prepare the Italian reader to his cri-
tique of Sorrentino (Prison Notebooks 3: 11ff). He is not addressing South
and Central Americans for whom the question is not asked because they
knew that they were not Anglo or Slavic or Chinese or Indians from South
Asia. Intellectuals certainly knew that the population of European descent
in South and Central America did not come from Germany (although
there were a few) or England (although there were a few) but that their
ancestors came from Spain, Italy or Portugal. In the second paragraph of
the same entry, Gramsci observes,
Characteristics of South and Central America [1] a considerable number

of Indians who, albeit passively, exercise an influence on the state: it
would be useful to have information on the social status of these Indi-
ans, on their economic importance, on their role in land ownership and
industrial production. (Prison Notebooks 3: 11)
Gramsci is telling this to the Italian reader. Leaving aside the question
of the passivity of the Indians (which was the landowner mythology
in South and Central America), we cannot assume that he was telling
this to Peruvians and other South and Central American countries.
Mariátegui, who died the same year as Gramsci, wrote the preceding
observations in 1930 when he published Seven Interpretive Essays along
with many articles that were overwhelmingly answering the questions
Gramsci was asking and correcting the mistakes he had made. This is
not a critique of Gramsci. This is a critique of those who expect that
because Gramsci wrote about South America, what he wrote was relevant
for South Americans who were living the experience he was describing
from Italy.
Now, regarding Gramsci’s assessment of South and Central America as
well as his assessment of the intellectuals in these locations, his views are
certainly very limited. He seems to have in mind the “organic intellectu-
als” and completely ignores some of his contemporaries, like Mariátegui
himself or the Cuban José Martí (1853 –1895), who died when Mariátegui
was still a child. I do not have time here to explore the dissident thoughts
that include not only Creole and Mestizos, but also Indians and Afri-
cans in South America. In this regard, Gramsci’s views are limited to the
European perspective, while Mariátegui offers a corrective to this type
of comment that prevails today in Le Monde Diplomatique, for instance. I
am sure that Italian and European critical intellectuals today question

Mariátegui’s assessment of Italy and Europe. The bottom line however is
not what Mariátegui and Gramsci said about the histories and societies of
the other, but why they say it. In both cases, what they said, the enoncé was
implicated in their own unapologetically original conceptual and politi-
cal framework (their own enunciation).
A second reader of this article pointed out that Gramsci’s interest in
South America emerged out of an “internationalization of the Southern
Question.” True. Based on what I just said about the enunciation, it could
be surmised that Mariátegui’s interest in Europe, Asia, Russia and Africa
was based on his interest on the “internationalization of the Indian Ques-
tion.” And both were right: there are Souths all over the globe as we
know today with the popular expression “the global south” and also there
is indigeneity all over the world for “global indigeneity” is meaningful
beyond the fi rst encounter between Indigenous Europeans and Indige-
nous people outside of Europe that happened in the Americas. The same
is true for Mariátegui. He has several writings on Europe and even reflec-
tions on the Italian Communist Party. Obviously, Mariátegui’s writings
on Europe, on Communism, on the international situation are not com-
ing from the internationalization of the Southern Question but out of the
internationalization of the Andean Question. I admire Gramsci, but I am
not ready to sacrifice the contribution of South American thinkers and fall
into an imperialism of the left using Gramsci as a banner. On the other
hand, the fact that Gramsci wrote on South America and Mariátegui on
Europe shall not make us forget that it is the loci of enunciation rather
than the object they talk about that give its full meaning to what they
have to say about South America and Europe, respectively. Furthermore,
my argument is about the uses of Gramsci in South America rather than
on Gramsci’s interest on South America. But all of this, prompted by the
question of one of the evaluators of this article, is a moot point. I was
asked to write about the uses of Gramsci in South America and not about
what he wrote and or why he could have written what he wrote about
South America.
Geopolitics of Knowledge: Mariátegui’s “Colonial Question”

and Gramsci’s “Southern Question”
Where Mariátegui and Gramsci run at the same speed and in the same
direction is on the colonial and the Southern Question, respectively.
However, the emphasis varies. In Mariátegui’s work, the colonial lega-
cies in the Andes are as central as is hegemony for Gramsci. If the future
for Gramsci was how to build socialist hegemony, for Mariátegui it was
how to decolonize and delink from colonial legacies. If at that point
Mariátegui was still thinking within a socialist future horizon, he was
walking toward it on a road parallel to Gramsci’s. Each of them were fac-

ing “similar” historical processes in “different” historical trajectories, but
both within the colonial matrix of power: the Southern Question comes
out of the emerging Italian bourgeoisie, liberating itself from the Bour-
bon monarchy and unifying Italy and starting the process of nation-state
building facing the heavy burden of the clergy that Gramsci constantly
reminds the reader of. That was not a major problem for Mariátegui.
Peru did not have the Pope but other institutions guiding the structuring
of society and of history. For Mariátegui the question of the nation-state
(whose process started about a century before his active intellectual and
political life), was strictly connected to Spanish colonial legacies, on the
one hand, and England and the US imperial management since the sec-
ond half of the nineteenth century. If Gramsci fl ags the role of the clergy
in South America it is not that it doesn’t exist, but it is that it is a major
problem for Gramsci rather than for Mariátegui. Mariátegui has other
enemies: the Spanish colonial legacies and the secularized Creoles and
Mestizos land and mine owner elites who implanted internal colonialism
in confl ictive relations with the church. That of course was not a problem
for Gramsci.
It is not that Mariátegui was oblivious of religions. It is that for him reli-
gion had priority over the institutional clergy. He devoted a chapter of his
Seven Interpretive Essays to “The Religious Factor.” The Andean region, and
in particular Peru where Mariátegui dwelled, was not Italy. Italy had Rome
and the papacy behind its religious history. Peru has Tawantinsuyu and the
Spanish colonization. And it is precisely here that Mariátegui begins his
chapter on religion, “the religion of Tawantinsuyu.” Cuzco, in the Incanate
(the parallel equivalent to a Roman Empire), was the center of the world as it
was Rome. But the religions were different: Rome was the center of enuncia-
tion of Christian theology. The Incanate, and Cuzco, was a place that Span-
ish Christians declared without religions and managed by the Devil. That
is indeed a heavy past to deal with. But what interests us here is what hap-
pened with Catholicism and Christianity during and after the independence.
According to Flores Galindo’s interpretation of Mariátegui,
Perú had a liberal and patriotic clergy from the first day of its revolution.
In a few isolated cases, civil liberalism was inflexibly Jacobin, and, in even
fewer cases, anti-religious. Most of our liberals came from the Masonic
lodges that were so active in preparing the independence, so they almost
all professed the deism that made Freemasonry in these Latin countries a
kind of spiritual and political substitute for the Reformation. (146)
To speculate about the clergy and the intellectuals in Latin America from
the background of the clergy in Italy may have been significant in Italy,
but not in Latin America. There is of course much more to say about the
question of the clergy, the intellectuals, and the local histories of Italy and
Peru. I hope these few indications help to understand that we are facing
crossing gazes when Gramsci talks about Latin America and Mariátegui
about Italy and Europe. They were both concerned with and theorizing
from the irreducible difference of their local history. However, they were
located at different points of the colonial matrix of power: Gramsci in
the South of Europe, a degraded part of Europe since Kant and Hegel’s
writing, while Mariátegui was located in the Andes and South America,
a degraded part of the world in Hegel’s philosophy of history. Located
at different points of the colonial matrix, Gramsci and Mariátegui were
responding from their own locations to the imperial universality of liberal-
ism, Marxism, and Christianity.
If we now turn the table around and attempt to understand the South-
ern Question and Gramsci’s take on it from the history of Peru, we would
fi nd out that Italy and Peru in the twenties were going through simi-
lar situations at two different ends of the colonial matrix spectrum: two
different manifestations of internal colonialism, one in the very history
of Europe and the other in the history of European colonial expansion
and domination.
Looked at from the standard perspective of Western universal history
to which local histories are appended, Italy and Peru have nothing to
do with each other. But if we look at them from the perspective of the
colonial matrix of power that emerged in the sixteenth century and is
still alive and well, then Italy and Peru are at the time two clear cases
of re-articulation of the internal and external colonial differences. The
colonial matrix is, in a nutshell, a structure of management and control
upon which the modern/colonial world and, in the last analysis, West-
ern civilization rests (Gramsci, Southern Question 171–85). It was put in
place by actors and institutions on a set of assumptions and categories of
thought and knowledge that made it possible to build and maintain the
interrelations between four basic spheres—authority (politics), economy
(including land as private property and natural resources), gender and
sexuality, knowledge and subjectivity—as a single, although transformed
through the century, matrix. It is the enunciation, in other words, that
made and makes possible to maintain the consistency and coherence of
the colonial matrix. The point I am driving at is that the matrix was
built, on the one hand, by delimiting a series of domains (just mentioned)
and, on the other, by securing the locus of enunciation for the manage-
ment and control of those domains. Thus in the process of building and
managing the colonial matrix, it was necessary to create a series of “dif-
ferences,” colonial and imperial, of which I would only here refer to the
“colonial differences.”10
Colonial differences were established vis-à-vis the non-European popu-
lation (e.g., Indians and blacks in the sixteenth century) and vis-à-vis the
European population (e.g., Jews and Roma in the same period). In the
eighteenth century, when the control of knowledge, and consequently the
management of authority and the economy moved to the North of Europe
(Germany, France, England), a new dimension of the difference appeared:
this time, the imperial difference in the history of Europe itself. To control
knowledge means to control the enunciation and by so doing to be able
to classify without being classified, to be able to degrade other forms of
knowledge, to demonize what is not sustainable according to the domi-
nant locus of enunciation. To control knowledge is not to control content
(the enunciated) but to control the logic that organizes the content (the
enunciation).11 The idea of “the South of Europe” was put in place with
all its transformations, internal structuring and consequences. Gramsci,
as a Southerner himself, lived in different places but his dwelling was
Southern memories, while Mariátegui was experiencing the legacy of the
external colonial difference that put him in the very notable situation of
being neither European nor Indian, but feeling the consequences of the
colonial difference.12
Gramsci in “Latin” America:

How Coloniality of Knowledge Works
I hope this sweeping contextualization would make understandable the
following question: who introduced Gramsci in “Latin America,” when
and why, since we know almost for sure that it was not Mariátegui who
initiated the process? And we know also through the previous narrative
that Mariátegui and Gramsci were foundational thinkers whose legacies
transcended their time and context. Gramsci’s influence has been wider
than Mariátegui’s. But that is understandable if we know how the colo-
nial matrix of power works and understand what colonial epistemic dif-
ferences mean. For this reason, when Gramsci entered “Latin” America
in the 1960s, those who introduced Gramsci respected Mariátegui but
the Andean situation in “Latin” America (of which they themselves were
part) was less meaningful than what was happening in Italy.13 But it is still
unthinkable that Mariátegui would have entered Italy in the same way:
peripheral thinkers are invisible in the European hegemony of thoughts
(right and left). That is why Sartre prefaced Fanon, but it is unthinkable to
imagine one of Sartre’s books introduced by Fanon. This line of argument
is decolonial rather than postcolonial. For one, Sartre wrote it during the
struggle for decolonization and, secondly, central to Sartre’s argument
addressing his European fellows, was to underscore that Fanon was no
longer writing to the Europeans: he was addressing the non-European
world, he was decolonizing knowledge rather than proposing a new post-
modern or postcolonial argument. Sartre was aware that Fanon was mov-
ing in a different direction. The shifting of the geography of reasoning

is one of the basic principles of decolonial thinking. Fanon, in the last
analysis, was a decolonial thinker and Sartre understood it. When Sartre
is addressing his European audience, or better yet, French audience, he is
telling them that Fanon is not talking to you but he is addressing a Third
World audience.
During my fi rst and second years at the University of Córdoba, Argen-
tina in 1963, I learned quickly (since I enrolled in an MA program in
philosophy and literature) that there was a new publication in Córdoba
steered by the young generation of Marxist intellectuals, with considerable
clout already at the University and in the intellectual milieu of Córdoba
(by then a city of around 600,000 people and close to a million today).
The journal they published was named Pasado y Presente. Soon, after the
fi rst issues, I found myself and other students reading Antonio Gramsci.
It all started with the young intellectual dissidents that broke up with the
Communist Party shortly after the fall of Juan Domingo Perón in 1955.
Curiously and interestingly enough, Gramsci entered Argentina through
Córdoba (the second largest city, very continental, and not through the
Atlantic port of Buenos Aires). In Brazil, Gramsci arrived later but under
similar circumstances: it was after the fall of Getulio Vargas in 1964 that
there was a reading and breathing room for the young generation that
felt not only cornered by Getulio Vargas but also by the Communist
Party.14 Gramsci, in other words, was invited in an environment of strong
nationalist revival in the early years of the Cold War and the early years
of the US’s plans for development and modernization of Latin America
(in this case, without quotation mark and without parenthesis). It was
also in the late 1960s, that what is known today as “dependency theory”
(a theory that originated in Argentina and was developed in Brazil, Chile
and Mexico, which confronted the rhetoric of development advanced by
the US in its project of development and modernization, after the Sec-
ond World War) began to be formulated. As is well known, dependency
theory was based on the CEPAL (Comisión Económica Para Amérida
Latina) report written under the guidance of Argentinian liberal econo-
mist Raúl Prebisch, according to which it was stated (in the second half
of the 1950s) that under current economic dependency conditions, Latin
American countries couldn’t develop according to the expectations of
the US program of modernization and development. The US program
of modernization and development was initiated after Harry Truman’s
presidential address (1949) in which he declared that many countries of
the world were underdeveloped. Those countries that, after 1955, will
be classified as “Third World.” But Gramsci was not used (and I do not
know if read) in the debate on dependency theory. One may surmise that
the question of underdevelopment and development was not an issue for
Southern Italy, in the terms that were announced by President Truman
and implemented by the US in the 1950s. If anything, “dependentistas”

were closer to Fanon and the struggle for decolonization in Africa than
to Gramsci, in spite of the differing points of view between Fanon and
the dependentistas when it came to the role of the State (Smith 247–88).
Dependency was obviously not, and did not have to be, one of Gram-
sci’s concerns. Dependency was not a problem of the internal colonial
differences in Europe (the Jewish question) or of the internal imperial
difference (the South of Europe). The internal colonial difference was
created in Europe in reference to their internal others (e.g., Jews, Roma)
while the internal imperial difference was created by Northern Anglo
monarchies (from Elizabeth I of England) downgrade the Latin Catholic
monarchies (Phillip II and Phillip III in Spain), well known as the “Black
Legend.”15 Basically, the imperial external difference was traced between
Europe and similar civilizations, that Europe considered inferior (like
the Ottoman). The internal imperial difference was constructed inside
Europe itself (e.g., Kant and Hegel constructing the South of Europe,
the Latin Catholic countries). The external colonial difference was cre-
ated to classify Indians and Blacks fi rst, and then the people colonized
by England and France during the nineteenth century. And if you look
around, all of this confi guration is alive and well. Italy was placed in the
South but still it was one of Europe’s industrial countries, while Brazil,
Argentina, Chile, and Peru, were not. All these countries were endur-
ing the consequences of being cast as and treated through the colonial
external difference.
But that was not all. The young Marxist Argentinian dissidents ( José
Aricó, Juan Carlos Portantiero, Oscar del Barco, Héctor Smuckler) from the
CP introduced a new and important dimension in the political and intellec-
tual debate, while many other debates were going on concurrently. Chiefly,
in Argentina, the previous generation was also dissident and their inspiration
to delink from the CP was an amalgam of Marxism at large and Perónism.
They were brilliant analysts of the global economy and imperial rearticula-
tions. For them, like for Mariátegui, history was a key factor to understand
Argentinian history from the colony to the republic and from the republic to
Juan Domingo Perón. They were also nationalists, and their school of thought
became known as “the nationalist left.”16 Gramsci thus entered Argentina
and “Latin” America by the doors opened by young intellectuals who in the
1960s were in their thirties. Intellectuals of the same generation were being
introduced in Argentina as well as in other countries of South America, par-
allel to Gramsci, to French structuralism and post-structuralism. Gramsci, in
other words, was part of a significant renewal absorbing intellectuals’ debate
in Europe (e.g., Althusserians v. Gramscians). This debate was reproduced
in South America where Althusserians and Gramscians debated with each
other and it coexisted with the origination in “Latin” America of dependency
theories, liberation theology and, in some way, the forgetting of Mariátegui.
Now, the point is that in countries with colonial legacies, the intellectual tra-
dition rooted in the history of the region has to coexist with the importation
of the last ideas being debated in Europe. Coloniality of knowledge works
in the entire spectrum and impinges on the right, the left and the center.
Gramsci, and European intellectuals in general, do not have to worry about
the debates going on in the colonies. The differential of epistemic power is
engrained in the colonial difference in all its facets and faces.
José Aricó, in his classic book on Gramsci in Latin America—a book
that is the product of his research, of course, but also of his engagement
with Gramsci and as an activist and political analyst—devoted a chapter
to the following question: “Why Gramsci in Latin América?” (34ff). What
were the circumstances and the needs that led to the incorporation of
Gramsci’s thoughts? For Aricó, Gramsci entered at the junction of two
key moments: the illusions awakened by the Cuban Revolution in 1959
and, by 1970, the moment of crisis of the Cuban Revolution coincided
with the repercussion, in Latin America, of the world crisis, the end of
the welfare state and the initial moment of a series of dictatorial regimes
(Pinochet in Chile, Videla in Argentina, the infamous “Operación Con-
dor,” etc).17 In the 1970s and 1980s the attention devoted to Gramsci by
the Latin American intelligentsia was increasing. In the context that Aricó
is describing, the concept of “hegemony” was the most helpful. As the
debates in the late 1970s were moving from dependency to transition to
democracy, the question of the State, central for Gramsci in his struggle
with fascism, was paralleled in Argentina and in “Latin” America. On
the question of the State, Gramsci offered an outlet to the indifference of
Marxist international thinking. His distinction between civil and political
society, next to that of hegemony, provided a concept of the state that was
alien to the orthodox Marxist thinking which saw in the State a bourgeois
institution to be superseded by the dictatorship of the proletariat and the
internationalization of the revolution. In South and Central America the
question of the State became central during the period of dictatorships in
Argentina, Chile and Brazil, and so Gramsci provided basic tools. How-
ever, in Bolivia, René Zavaleta Mercado was moving away from Gramsci
and rethinking the State in relation to the national-popular.18
From a decolonial perspective one of the most interesting aspects of
Gramsci’s reception was his distinction between the “Occident” and “Ori-
ent.” For decolonially, decolonially, the main problem was not so much class
struggle or the State but the West (Occident) in which both class struggle and
the (modern) State originated. The issues were already framed in indigenous
thinking to which of course the Gramscian left was blind. Political thinking
scould only come from Europe; no original thinking could exist beyond the
Western tradition.
José Aricó reflects on this point as follows. In the distinction between
Orient and Occident that Gramsci introduced in his Notebooks, Aricó
concludes that “Latin” America belongs in Gramsci’s term to Occident.

Reflecting also on Juan Carlos Portantiero’s seminal book on Gramsci,
Aricó accepts that the concept of Occident is wide enough to include
both European countries beyond the core of Europe. He described as
estados periféricos (or peripheral states) countries like Italy, Poland and
Portugal. The reason Portantiero located these countries in the periph-
ery was due to his reading of Gramsci’s perception that the articulation
between the State and the society was through the intermediary social
classes. Such intermediary classes to a certain extent, attempt and suc-
ceed in advancing a politics of their own interest while in other cases, they
attract the proletarian class, and are also but above all influential among
the peasants.19 Portantiero was reflecting on societies where industrial-
ization was more “advanced” and compared them with Latin American
countries:
Comparable by their type of development and differing in their ir-

reproducible historical formation, those countries are comparable to
Latin America. Latin America is not the “Orient” for it is clear that
it has common features with the peripheral West, late in its develop-
ment. In Latin America we can see more clearly this “second West”
that was formed in Europe toward the end of the nineteenth Century.
In Latin America it is the State and politics that model society. But it
is a type of State—and here we go into one of the aspects of dependent
States—that while attempting to shape a national community cannot
achieve the degrees of autonomy and sovereignty of the “Bismarck-
ian” and “Bonapartian” models. In Latin America all the struggles
during the nineteenth century were struggles among economically
similar groups that fought among themselves for the control of the
State. The aim was to control the State to develop the economy
in order to promote a more complex structure of social classes.
(Portantiero 93)
The quote is interesting for several reasons. First, it ends up on the

question of the State, but without taking into account the differentials
between the modern European State and the colonial states in “Latin”
America. That is, the colonial difference that was clearly seen by scholars
in the Subaltern Studies project, chiefl y by Partha Chatterjee (The Nation
and Its Fragments) was invisible to the “Latin” American Gramscian. But
the colonial difference was not invisible to Bolivian intellectual Zavaleta
Mercado. The period of his intellectual work (roughly from 1960 to 1984)
was precisely the moment that, without naming it as such, he realized that
Marxist categories and Gramsci in particular whom he had endorsed in
previous years, fell short of explaining a “motley society” or “sociedad
abigarrada.” Second, for Gramsci the two categories (Orient and Occi-
dent) are a way to describe the relations between the State and the Civil
Society—racism, in America is as pervasive as classism in Europe. Curi-
ously enough, the uses of Gramsci in South America not only displaced
Mariátegui from the intellectual scene, but also Zavaleta Mercado and
Fausto Reinaga. Motley society is a crucial concept to understand the
layers and interlayers of social formations in colonial societies. We can
fi nd nothing like that in Gramsci, and the Latin American left ignored
the concept until the books by Luis Antezama and Luis Tapia, in the past
twenty years when the colonial question awakened the left, was put again
in circulation. This is not a critique of Gramsci, of course. He did what he
had to do. It is a critique of the colonial mentality of the left in South and
Central America. So, if the question is to understand the uses of Gramsci
in South and Central America, we have to be aware that his work served,
unintentionally, to displace the local production of knowledge. Gramsci
indeed was also local production of knowledge, but why does Zavaleta
remain only as local while the Gramscians pretend that Gramsci is uni-
versal (or at least global)?
The West or “Occidente” was not a central problem for Gramsci. But of
course it is for all those who do not belong to the six dominant European
languages. Now, there are indeed at least three Occidents: Hegel’s heart
of Europe, Gramsci’s peripheral Europe, and the “colonial Occident”
(America except the US) that was self-described by an Argentine intel-
lectual as “the confi ne of Occident.” 20 There is the Occident in which the
interconnections between the economy, class structure, and state appear
in a more balanced organization and the Occident in which such rela-
tions are still in less articulated conditions. Those were, for Gramsci, the
frontier or peripheral states (Poland, Italy, Spain and Portugal). For the
Argentinian left it was important that Gramsci’s thought emerged from his
living and observing peripheral occidental societies. For that reason, they
concluded, certain Latin American societies, like Argentina, Brazil and
Mexico where industrialization was advanced, were similar to the Euro-
pean peripheral societies. The historical blindness was remarkable—both
for Argentinian and Brazilian followers of Gramsci—for Spain and Portu-
gal are deeply rooted in the colonial memories. Gramsci’s analogy was
possible for the Argentinian and Brazilian left, because their own colonial
past was suppressed. That memory was very present in the entire work of
José Carlos Mariátegui. From a decolonial perspective Italy, Spain and
Portugal are the roots of European self-proclaimed (imperial) modernity.
Portugal-Brazil will need further and specific consideration, which is not
the place to go into here. Poland is perhaps the closest parallel to “Latin”
America in the sense that since the sixteenth century it went through a
series of violent colonizations and partitions by the Russian Tzarate, the
Kingdom of Prussia, and the Hapsburg Monarchy. For the new left (the
Gramscian) the legacies of the colonial past and the distinction between
countries with imperial legacies (Italy, Spain, Portugal) and countries with
colonial legacies (Poland, Argentina, Brazil, Mexico) was not as important
as it was for the “national left” whose arguments were based both in the
history of the nation and the history of imperialism (from Spain and Por-
tugal, to England and France, and to the US). The new left had two foci:
to liberate themselves from the Communist Party and to reflect on the
State during the era of dictatorship. The national left was also formed in
contradistinction with the Communist Party, but it focused on the crossing
between national and imperial histories in the history of particular coun-
tries as well as in the history of South and Central America.
Gramsci entered “Latin” America perhaps a decade before he made
his way into the South Asian Subaltern Studies historiographical proj-
ect, and the emphasis was different. “Subalternity” was seldom, if ever,
an issue for South American Gramscians. What caught their attention
were the concepts of “hegemony” (chiefly Ernesto Laclau) and “historical
block.” 21 This difference is telling of what Gramsci took to India and what
Gramsci took to Argentina. South Asian Subaltern Studies scholars and
intellectuals were quick to mutate “subalternity” and make it work in the
colonial history of India. The colonial context made it necessary to clarify
the distinction between hegemony and domination. 22 “Subaltern subjects”
are formed—as is well known—not only by the larger class of deprived,
politically marginalized, economically exploited, and subjectively under-
mined individuals, as Gramsci taught us to see. Next to subaltern subjects
are the “colonial subjects,” and colonial subjects are a different species
of subaltern. Colonial subjects are crossed by racism and, therefore, by
the colonial and imperial differences. Colonial subjects are specifically
those marked by the double-crossing of racism and patriarchy, enduring
the colonial wound. These are not central concerns in Gramsci, but they
are in Fanon and Mariátegui. In this regard, subalternity in India is very
close to Fanon’s damnés, and one could wonder why it was Gramsci and not
Fanon who became the point of reference for Asian Subaltern Studies. 23
A quick answer would be that Fanon was, like Mariátegui, a respected
but second-class thinker; a thinker from the colonies. Beyond Gramsci’s
brilliancy, there was also the clout of being a European thinker. Italy has
a huge peasant population, but not as huge as India’s. Furthermore, Italy
belonged in the nineteenth century, to the “peripheral” modern, capitalist
countries of Europe while India was colonized by the leading European
imperial country, Britain. What is at stake here is the internal colonial
difference (or internal colonialism) in which Gramsci is thinking and the
external colonial difference that lay at the historical foundation of Gan-
dhi, Nehru, and the South Asian Subaltern Studies. That was where pro-
gressive intellectuals from the ex-colonies looked for their own salvation.
They were not looking much into their own past. That is why Mahatma
Gandhi is somewhat despised by Guha. 24 Thus, the generation who intro-
duced Gramsci and created Pasado y Presente could have named their pub-
lication Amauta—that was the journal started by Mariátegui. Amauta in
Quechua-Aymara languages means “philosopher, man of wisdom.” But
that would have been taken as traditional. Instead, Gramsci was a song
“for the young generation” of modernity. In fact, it was the same ideol-
ogy of modernity that the US was using to promote their own projects of
“development and modernization;” the project that provoked the critical
responses of dependency theory and theology of liberation.
Now the fact that Gramsci entered Argentina through Córdoba and not
through Buenos Aires was not by chance. There is a long history that gave
Córdoba its place in Argentina. In 1575, the University of Córdoba was
inaugurated. That was a few decades after the creation of the University
of Santo Domingo, the University of Mexico, and the University of San
Marcos in Lima and about sixty years before the foundation of Harvard
University in 1636. During the nineteenth century Córdoba was a focus
of the civil war and the national re-organization since 1862. In 1918, Cór-
doba was the focus of Reforma Universitaria (University Reformation) that
had an impact all over Spanish America. By the 1960s, Córdoba became
a center of industrial modernization and development. The car industry
was responsible for the miracle: FIAT, Kayser, and Renault found their
home in Córdoba. And because of that, in 1969 the city witnessed “El
Cordobazo:” the workers of Kayser industry, with the support of the stu-
dent population, literally took the city. The uprising, that came about a
year and a half after the “global 1968” (Beijing, Czechoslovakia, Paris,
Mexico), was led not by the Marxist avant-garde but by workers and
students in the long tradition of Córdoba University and the shorter tradi-
tion of university reformation. The fact then that it was in Córdoba where
Gramsci found his fi rst shelter in Argentina is indeed quite relevant. And
it explains also why Mariátegui was less relevant in this context: the his-
tory of Argentina that Perón was able to mobilize. That is, the people
from the countryside and the Bolivian workers that migrated to Buenos
Aires were shattered by the shining path of industrialization, modern-
ization, and development that transformed Córdoba from a provincial
and colonial city into a modern city—the center, nothing less, of the car
industry. And we all know the meaning the car industries had in the
Third World—they carried the promises of entering the route toward the
First World. Thus, Gramsci in Córdoba did not come with the “Southern
Question,” but with the “Northern Question.” Gramsci arrived at Cór-
doba, Argentina, at the moment the city was becoming the hub of the
automobile industry: Kayser, Renault and Fiat set their plants and office
in the outskirts of the city. They developed a large body of workers. The
industrial environment of Cordoba, where Gramsci found his home in
Argentina, was like the Milano of Luchino Visconti’s Rocco e i suoi fratelli
(1960): the Southern Question in the Industrial North.
The Garden of Forking Paths

I have already mentioned the national left (la izquierda nacional, sometimes also
referred to as Marxismo nacional) that made a mark on the political and intel-
lectual debate in Argentina; a debate with projection mainly in Spanish Amer-
ica, since Brazil belongs to a different colonial trajectory.25 For the national left
that preceded the arrival of Gramsci, history was of the essence. And that his-
tory was the Spanish colonial history followed by the liberal orientation, after
independences, in the foundation of colonial nation-states.26 The national left
emerged, indeed, in 1945 when Juan Domingo Perón was rescued from military
captivity and became president of Argentina. At that time a significant number
of intellectuals in their forties (they were born in the first decade of the twenti-
eth century), turned the page and reclaimed Marx independently from Mos-
cow. But, at the same time, they reclaimed the national history narrated from
a Marxist perspective and introduced a superb analysis of the history of British
and US imperialism in America and in Argentina.27 Contrary to what hap-
pened in India, where Marxist narratives where disqualified and superseded
in the South Asian Subaltern Studies project,28 the national left in Argentina
was not superseded by the Gramscian left that emerged in the early 1960s.
They both followed parallel and different paths: the splendor of the national
left was to absorb Marx and integrate his work in the historical task of build-
ing “national consciousness” and to make Marxism work from inside, from the
history of previous colonialism and current imperial forces.29 Its misery was to
create the conditions for national fundamentalism.
But there were other paths unfolding at the time Gramsci entered in
Argentina and Latin America in the 1960s. One was the decolonial path
opened up (and obviously marginalized) by the Argentine philosopher of
German descent, Rodolfo Kusch (1920–1979). In the twenty-seven years
that elapsed between his fi rst book Seduction de la Barbarie (1952), and his
last book, Geocultura del Hombre Americano (1979), a critical and relent-
less line of demarcation was traced between the right and the left. The
right was mainly characterized by the urban middle class (wanting to be
European) of Buenos Aires and by the imperial theories of modernization
and development; the left by general tendencies of the time. Kusch is not
personalizing, but is confronting the general principles and assumptions
of the Marxist left. Thus, if you are engaged in a double critique of the
left and the right in their Euro-American point of origination and their
route of dispersion in the Americas, and you think from the histories and
experiences of the popular (not the subaltern) and the Indigenous, then
chances are that among the available options you engage in decolonial
thinking. 30 A parallel story was that of Aymara intellectual and activist,
Fausto Reinaga in Bolivia.During the years between the late 1950s (when
he returned from France) and his death in 1994, Fausto Reinaga was also
engaged in a parallel trajectory of decolonial thinking based on the mem-

ories, categories of thoughts, and sensibilities of Quechua-Aymara histo-
ries in the Andean regions.
Scholars generally agreed that Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks marks one of
the nodal points of Western Marxism’s break with Leninism and the breed
of Marxism born of the Bolshevik Revolution. Vice-president of Bolivia,
Alvaro García Linera, assessing the situation of the country in 2007, did
worry about making such a distinction:
Any state crisis, then, may be reversible, or it may continue. If the cri-
sis continues, a subsequent stage is the catastrophic equilibrium. Lenin
spoke of a revolutionary situation, Gramsci of catastrophic equilibrium,
both referring to the same phenomenon albeit in distinct languages.
(“Catastrophic Equilibrium and Point of Bifurcation”)
The point is not of course about scholarly debates. The question ges-
tures toward the correlation between Marxism and ethnicity/racism in
America and the Caribbean. Garcia Linera is facing in Bolivia a situa-
tion that neither Lenin nor Gramsci could have imagined: a country in
which 60% of the population are the aboriginals of the land and Marx-
ism being a way of thinking and being that suits people of European
descent but not so much Indians and people of African descent. Or
course I’m not referring to the fact that there were no aboriginals, but
to the fact that colonial legacies in America (and the US—as well as in
Africa) present problems and issues alien to those the Russian Lenin
confronted and the Italian Gramsci was dealing with. I am suggesting
that in spite of the conceptual differences between Lenin and Gramsci,
there were more commonalities between Russia and Southern Italy at
the margin of Europe than with the Andes of South America: the land,
territory, history, memory and living experience Indians have endured
through fi ve hundred years of European colonialism, including, of course,
Marxism.
The issues confronted by Indo and Afro intellectuals, scholars and
activists are not the same as those affl icting Euro-descendent activists,
scholars and intellectuals. We are all living in the same world, but we
inhabit different corners of the colonial matrix of power. Marxist views
cannot be universal, neither for that matter, Liberal, Christian or Islamic
views. The decolonial fi nds its place right there, on the cracks produced
in the clash of abstract universal in their struggle to obtain a universal
hegemony. If we are to still use the Gramscian concepts, it is necessary
to extricate them from the modern political theoretical frame in which it
emerges and to bring it to the decolonial horizon. In that horizon, decolo-
nial hegemony would look like pluriversality as a universal project rather
than the hegemony of one abstract universal.
When I say that in America Gramsci has been used mainly by the
population of European descent, but not so much by indigenous and
Black radical thinkers, I have two scenarios in mind; one is Fausto Rein-
aga, Aymara intellectual and activist. In his book The Indian Revolution
he stated,
The manifesto of the Partido Indio de Bolivia (PIB) does not have to
be subjected to any model, rule or logic, formal or intellectual, that
rules the political parties of the White-mestizo “cholaje” [cfr. People
of Indian ancestry mixed with other ethnicities, mixed in blood but
¨white¨ in mind] of Bolivia and Indoamérica. 31 This is not a mani-
festo of the social class. It is a manifesto of a race, of a people, of a Na-
tion: the manifesto of an entire culture oppressed and silenced. It is
not possible to compare with Marx´s Communist Manifesto. It is not
possible to compare because the genial “Moor” did not confront the
West (Occident). He confronted the proletarian with the bourgeois
class and proposed, within the same Western Civilization, the “in-
tangida” [cfr. incapable of being thought out or realized] communist
revolution. (Reinaga 382; my own translation)
Reinaga assumed his Aymara identity. As such he perceived that a com-

munist revolution within Western civilization could not really be a revo-
lution. Some say he is mestizo. He may have been mestizo in blood, but
he was Indian in mind, while mestizos in blood are generally white in
mind. Mestizos of white mind couldn’t take it and accused him of being
mestizo and pretending to be Indian. The point is this: in the preface to
his The Indian Revolution, which we just read in the previous quotation,
he is saying that for him the problem is not the struggle between prole-
tariat and bourgeoisie, but that the problem is Western civilization in its
entirety, including the proletarian and bourgeois classes. In other words,
proletariat and bourgeoisie are not universal concepts. And whether uni-
versal history is determined by class struggle is an open question. For
Reinaga, as for any decolonial thinker (not only in America but in the
Middle East [or better yet, West Asia] and Africa, and Central, East and
South East Asia) the problem is not just capitalism but the West of which
both capitalism and Marxism are two important aspects. The problem is
coloniality of power, of which the type of economy described by Liberals
and Marxists as capitalism is a component, a fundamental one nowadays,
but only a component and not the full story.
The second scenario comes from Afro-Caribbean intellectuals and schol-
ars, some of them residing in the US. All are “Fanonians” rather than “Gram-
scian.” You see the point. Lewis Gordon—philosopher from Jamaica—made
an insightful observation tracing the distinctions between Europe and Amer-
ica (in general, from pole to pole) and is very important for my argument.
Gordon suggested that Europe smells like class while the Americas smell
like race. What did he mean by that? The Europe of the Industrial Revolu-
tion and of Marxism is basically “white” Europe. 32 The South, where mixing
bloods and religions could be found, was fi rst “purified” with the expulsion
of Jews and Moors since the end of the fi fteenth century. Furthermore, by
the end of the eighteenth century, Enlightenment philosophers were effective
in downgrading the South/Latin region of Europe. In such a way that when
the question of class began to be formulated, it was formulated in the heart
of Europe (England, Germany and France) where ethno-racial confl icts were
invisible since the majority of the population was white and Christian.
On the other hand, Paget Henry published a landmark book in 2003 that
was awarded the fi rst annual Fanon Prize by the Caribbean Philosophical
Association in 2004. The title of the book is Caliban’s Reason: Introducing
Afro-Caribbean Philosophy.33 The chapter before last is devoted to “Caribbean
Marxism: After the Neoliberal and Linguistic Turn.” There is not one sin-
gle quote from Gramsci. Certainly, the chapter focuses on the period “after
the neo-liberal and linguistic turn” and Gramsci strongly entered in Latin
America in the 1960s, but apparently not so strongly in the Caribbean. But
the time period should be a factor since Henry devotes a chapter to C. L. R.
James, and James adhered to a certain extent to Marxism, until he was dis-
enchanted and wrote Beyond a Boundary (1963), a personal and critical narra-
tive of cricket in Jamaica. The year of the publication of James’s book was the
year in which Gramsci was being received by young generations of Marxists,
in Argentina and Brazil, disenchanted with the Communist Party.
As we can imagine, not quoting Gramsci was not Henry’s oversight of
careless scholarship. It is just that for Caribbean black intellectuals, Gramsci
was not addressing issues relevant to them. Certainly, radical Black thinkers
of the twentieth century have been all critics of capitalism, like Gramsci.
However, as you can imagine, Marxism doesn’t have the monopoly of that
kind of criticism and visions toward the future. As Fanon said in The Wretched
of the Earth, “Marxist analysis should always be slightly stretched every time
we have to deal with the colonial problem” (xx). 34
Last but not least, Anthony Bogues—Jamaican political theorist—wrote a
book about Black radical intellectuals. His line of reasoning is parallel to that
of Fanon. Bogues writes,
Regimes of domination do not rest solely upon economic, political, so-

cial and cultural power. They also exist and conduct politics within a
field of political and social knowledge, of ideas that form part of the self-
consciousness of all members of society. Given the nature of anti-black
racism and the racialized object (who is human), the black radical intel-
lectual as critic is fi rst of all engaged with challenging the knowledge
regime of the dominant power. (70)
Here, Bogues refers to the knowledge regime that made the intellectual an
object and less human. For Gramsci this was not a problem. Gramsci was
put in prison because of his ideas not because the color of his skin, and the
meaning of “blackness” in Western white modernity. I am not saying that
one form of violence (because of ideas or because of skin color or religious
belief) deserves more attention or has an epistemic privilege over the other. I
am saying that for the “Latin” American left that introduced Gramsci, racism
was not a problem. And Bogues further on observes,
[W]e have already noticed that the radical black intellectual is, to use
Gramsci’s term, an “organic” intellectual. But he or she is organic with
a difference. While in the Gramscian mode radical organic intellectuals
provide the missing inventory of the spontaneous philosophy of ordi-
nary people, they do so within a framework and discursive practice that
do not call into question their own ontological natures. (71)
The “difference” in question is the colonial epistemic and ontological differ-

ence. The awareness of this difference brings to the scholar and intellectual,
the unavoidable need to engage in border thinking, in bringing out his or her
double consciousness. And when you enter this path you are going in a dif-
ferent direction to the one opened up by Gramsci. They could complement
each other, but they are irreducible to one another. Gramsci opened new vistas
toward socialist projects and future. Indigenous and Black radical thinkers
opened up vistas of decolonial trajectories and futures.
“Decolonization” means something other than emancipation (a common
term used by liberals and Marxists) and liberation (the preferred concept in the
struggle of political decolonization during the Third World and also of theology
of liberation). “Decolonization” takes us to a step beyond emancipation and
liberation. And that is Fanon’s great contribution. Therefore, if you are in the
struggle for decolonization and you are an Afro-Caribbean intellectual (man
or woman), the problems you face are significantly different from the problems
you face if you are a “Latin” American intellectual, man or woman for whom
Gramsci was and may very well continue to be a guiding light of your thoughts
and actions. But remember, there are other equally valid options.
Notes
1. The title implicitly invokes its missing counterpart: “Gramsci and Mariatégui in
Europe.” Coloniality of knowledge (and Eurocentrism) implies that intellectual
influences are centrifugal, never centripetal. Many of the ideas advanced here,
were rehearsed in a seminar co-taught, at Duke, with Roberto Dainotto in the
Fall of 2009 titled “The left, the right and the decolonial.” The two pillars of
the seminar were Gramsci and Mariátegui. I am thankful to Roberto for his
generosity in sharing his substantial knowledge and understanding of Gramsci’s

work as well as the students in the seminar.
2. For the “arrival” of Gramsci to Brazil in the 1960s, see Lincoln Secco; in Argen-
tina, see Portantiero.
3. For further explanation see Mignolo, The Idea of Latin America.
4. See O’Donnell. For a summary, see the superb report by one of the actors
involved in the debate, the sociologist Nun 375–93. Nun distinguished “liberal
democracy” from “democratic liberalism” to avoid the imperial bent associated
with the former expression.
5. By 1990, Nicos Poulantzas’s Las clases sociales en el capitalismo actual was running its
tenth edition. It was published by Siglo Veintiuno, a publishing house with a strong
leaning to the left with wide distribution in Spanish American countries.
6. Institute of Philosophy at the ZRC SAZU (Scientific and Research Center of the
Slovenian Academy of Science and Art).
7. Quijano, “Colonialidad y Modernidad/Racionalidad” 11–20. Although the con-
cept was already circulating at the end of the 1980s, the fi rst printed version was
in 1991.
8. Quijano, Anibal. “Coloniality and Modernity/Rationality.” 168–78.
9. I have explored in several places the question of “Latinity,” notably in The Idea
of Latin America. It was very well known and debated among intellectuals from
the right and from the left that “Latinity” was mainly a French imperial export
and a right wing South American elite’s import.
10. For a more detailed explanation, see Grzinic’s interview with Walter Mignolo.
11. I have elaborated on geopolitics of knowledge in several places. See for instance,
Chapter 2 of Local Histories/Global Designs. See also, “Geopolitics of Knowledge
and the Colonial Difference” 57–96.
12. I have dealt with the distinction between ¨living¨ and ¨dwelling¨ in several
occasions. The most recent is in “I Am Where I Think.”
13. Gramsci’s translation appeared in Argentina toward the end of the 1950s and
beginning of the1960s: Gramsci, El Materialismo, Introducción a la filosofía de la
praxis, Los Intelectuales y la Organización de la Cultura, and Notas sobre Maquiavelo,
sobre Política y sobre el Estado Moderno.
14. See Secco.
15. See Greer, Mignolo, and Quilligan.
16. One of the most prolific writers of the national left (delinking from the Commu-
nist Party) was José Hernández Arregui. Among his most relevant books, Impe-
rialismo y cultura (1964); La formación de la conciencia nacional (1961); Nacionalismo
y liberación (1969). Notice that the national left was active during the years that
Gramsci was being translated and incorporated into the Gramscian left. Two
different lefts, indeed.
17. For “Operación Condor” see The National Security Archive.
18. On the work of Zavaleta Mercado, see Antezama and Tapia. In reality, Tapia’s
book is mostly, and rightly so, about “the local production of knowledge” than
about “the production of local knowledge.” That is precisely the point I am
underlying here on Gramsci and Mariátegui; they are engaged in the local
production of knowledge rather than in the production of local knowledge.
19. Gramsci, “Un exámen del a situación italiana” 286.
20. See Canal Feijoo. The concern of being Peripherals was very pronounced in the
1950s.
21. Laclau and Mouffe. Laclau left Argentina during the years that Gramsci was
introduced and returned Gramsci to Europe, so to speak.
22. See Guha, Dominance without Hegemony. The uses of Gramsci by Guha and the
South Asian Subaltern Studies collective are radically different from the uses
of Gramsci by the New Left in Latin America. The contention for dominance,
between the two groups studied by Guha (the British colonial elite and the local
Indian elite), was no longer comparable with the situation in South and Central
America whose countries obtained “independence” in the fi rst half of the nine-
teenth century.
23. Mignolo, “On Subaltern and Other Agencies” 381–407.
24. Interestingly enough, Guha critiqued Gandhi for his shortcoming in front of the
masses, while Partha Chatterjee and Ashis Nandy highly praise Gandhi for his
overall decolonial (my word, not theirs) project and his confrontation with West-
ern civilization. For Gramsci, Western Civilization was not a concern (neither
for Marx): they were living and thinking within it. For Reinaga and Gandhi,
and for Mariátegui Western civilization was a problem because it is part capital-
ism. For Marx and Gramsci, capitalism was a problem, not Western Civiliza-
tion. For Guha, see the section on Gandhi in his Dominance without Hegemony.
See the interviews with Partha Chatterjee and Ashis Nandy in Jahanbegloo.
25. On the Argentine national left, see the useful summary written by Chumbita in
El pensamiento alternativo en la argentina del siglo XX. See also the monographic
volume edited by Zulma Palermo with a preface by Walter Mignolo.
26. I said “colonial nation-states” for the simple reason that their historical founda-
tions in America, Africa and Asia (after the Second World War) differ from
the historical foundation of “modern nation-states” in Europe after the French
Revolution, because the French was not a revolution against imperial domina-
tion but, on the contrary, it opened the ways to new forms of imperialism. Italy
although in a minor scale, was in the same path. Italy’s colonies were not of the
same scale as France’s and England’s, but the colonial mentality (and frustra-
tions) were there. We should remember that Fascism, Nazism and Francoism
materialized in countries that remain in the margins of “the core of Europe”:
Spain lost all its colonies in 1898, and Italy’s and Germany’s colonial posses-
sions were of a minor scale. Gramsci was living and thinking in that tradi-
tion and memories; Mariátegui and the national-left in the colonial history of
Spanish America. And of course, the Subaltern Studies South Asia group were
still thinking within a colonial situation that not only was different from South
America, but was radically different from that of Italy. The introduction of
Gramsci in Spanish America (and in Brazil), allowed its followers to cut the
strings with the “populism” of the national left and focus, instead, on the theo-
retical aspects of class struggles within the capitalist logic: capitalist bourgeoi-
sie against the working class. The nationalist-left was fully aware of the racial
aspects of colonial histories; the Gramscians were not.
27. Among the many books published on these issues, see, José Hernández Arregui,
(1913–1974), Imperialismo y Cultura (1957), La formación de la conciencia nacional
(1960), Jorge Abelardo Ramos (1921–1994), Socialismo y ejército en la semicolonia
(1968), El marxismo de Indias (1972). Arturo Jauretche (1901–1974), Ejército y
política (1958), Política y economía (1977), Los profetas del odio y la yapa. La colo-
nización pedagógica (1975). For a recent re-evaluation of the national left from a
decolonial perspective, see Zulma Palermo, Pensamiento Argentino y opción desco-
lonial. Of note here is the book by Hernández Arregui, Imperialismo y Cultura
(1957).
28. See the classical debate between Gyan Prakash, on the one hand, and O’Hanlon
and Washbrook, on the other, in Prakash, “Can the ‘Subaltern’ Ride? A Reply
to O’Hanlon and Washbrook.”
29. For a recent reevaluation of this trajectory, see Palermo (with a preface by Wal-
ter Mignolo).
30. See Kusch.
31. Notice that for Reinaga there is no “Latin” America—the America of Euro-
pean descent belongs, but “Indo” America, the America of the Indians; my
addition.
32. See Gordon 65.
33. See Henry.
34. See Fanon, Les damnés de la terre xx.
Part III
Epilogue
Interview with Gayatri
Chakravorty Spivak
Baidik Bhattacharya: We want to begin with the connection between

Antonio Gramsci’s work and “postcolonial studies.” One of the central con-
cerns in this dialogue across boundaries has been the notion of the “sub-
altern.” Writing in 1995 you observed, “Although I read it [i.e., subaltern]
fi rst in Gramsci, I encountered it in its current usage fi rst in the work of the
Subaltern Studies group. As a result of the publication of Selected Subaltern
Studies, in the US, the word has now lost some of its defi nitive power” (The
Spivak Reader 280–81). Could you please tell us a bit more about this history
of a word with restricted “defi nitive power” in the intervening years? And
taking this as an example could you tell us your assessment of the impact of
Gramsci’s work on the postcolonial project?
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak: It is a difficult but important question,

isn’t it? By defi nitive power I mean the power to give us defi nitions that
are also rules of thumb, so we can progress rather than simply produce
knowledge as power. This was somewhat undermined to begin with by the
effect of what Edward W. Said called “travelling theory.” The US is a place
where intellectual commodification is extreme—and I don’t think one should
really today, in globalization, speak only about the US, but let’s use that as
shorthand—so, what I would say is that a good desire on my part, in the mid-
1980s, to make the work of Subaltern Studies more easily accessible to those
of us who taught in the US, did inevitably cause a certain dilution of the
word, what Raymond Williams would describe as the dominant, appropriat-
ing opposition as alternative, and Herbert Marcuse and Robert Paul Wolff
would call “repressive tolerance.” (I should add here that the subalternists
themselves were not particularly keen to embrace international popularity.
They had sufficient popularity among specialists in the field.) As a result of
this dilution, the claim to native informantship on the part of the upwardly
mobile, or desiring to be upwardly mobile, new immigrant population after
1965 began to fi nd a new word with which to describe itself; not just native
informant—it was never a word for them, it was for me. But, subaltern became
a claim to a certain kind of undifferentiated victimage. I quote always Fredric
222 The Postcolonial Gramsci
Jameson’s surprising axiom that “subaltern is anybody who feels inferior.”
This is the fi rst part of my answer, the easier part.
As for the trajectory of Gramsci, Giorgio Baratta has recently observed in
an article that I read through the International Gramsci Newsletter but appar-
ently it had its fi rst publication somewhere else, an Italian journal published
in English, that Gramsci seems to be almost the only older Communist
theorist who has emerged unstained from the fate of actual International
Communism, and he warns us that Gramsci is increasingly read as a liberal
democrat, whereas what both he and I think is that Gramsci is a democratic
Communist. Sitting in West Bengal today, after the collapse of the left, this
is a difficult project to restore because the local presentation of an interna-

tional way of thinking has made the left here clueless and corrupt and elec-
torally expendable. But I get ahead of myself. When in the early 1980s the
Subaltern Studies folks got inspired by Gramsci, I think, what they looked at
was that Gramsci was locating a subject outside of capital logic, the study of
which could not be performed through the regular historiographies of mod-
ern India. (As a result of the publication of Selected Subaltern Studies, Latin
American subaltern studies groups got started. There the effect of Gramsci
is not particularly noticeable.) But Ranajit Guha and his collective went to
Gramsci because of this place outside of capital logic. Dipesh Chakrabarty’s
fi rst book is resonant with this. Even at that early stage, Barun De noted that
this was not exactly true to Gramsci. For me, this is a good thing, intellectual
activism that re-territorializes a powerful original. Yet we must also note
the difference from Gramsci. In notes on “History of the Subaltern Classes:
Methodological Criteria” Gramsci gives a powerful defi nition in the second
paragraph, which will boil down in my language as the following: the subal-
tern classes do not achieve the state. This is slightly upstream from the circuit
of citizenship although that is what is implied. But, Gramsci is still talking
there about how to write history. And so he suggests that you cannot fi nd
records, and therefore, that famous metaphor, “inventory without traces.”
Now, this is not the case of the South Asian subalterns. Because nobody
achieved the state in colonialism—no natives, not even the ICSs, the Deputy
Magistrates and so on—they do not precisely achieve the state, number one.
Number two, there is, if anything, an excess of record; so, therefore, the
task became immediately different. In other words, teasing out the conscious-
ness of the subaltern or the subaltern consciousness from the texts of the
elite—that wasn’t Gramsci. But for me, it is not problematic. It is the historical
stamp on the South Asian subaltern studies work.
Let us go back to Gramsci. As you know, Palmiro Togliatti was Gram-
sci’s literary executor. Togliatti and Gramsci had serious political differences,
although they were friends and associates, over relationships with Moscow
and various things which may not concern us here. And it was Togliatti
who chopped up Gramsci in the way in which Europe and Britain received
him. In the process, what got lost was Gramsci’s (after all, these notes on the
subaltern are precisely that) articulation of what I have called a methodico-
methodological difference under the auspices of the subaltern. I am revising
in Kunming, China, far from my personal library. So let me simply say that
if one reads Gramsci’s many notes on the subaltern raw, one fi nds this dif-
ference indicated between method and methodology which the reader must
elaborate (work at). It is only now that with Joseph A. Buttigieg’s excellent
translation—annotated critical translation of the Notebooks—we are beginning
to realize that Gramsci, on the occasion of the subaltern, began to talk about
the need to acknowledge that in order to devise a methodology for the study
of the subaltern, one had to realize that the intellectual’s method was pro-
duced in a different class-space and that there would always be a difference

between the method and the methodology; and that difference pretty much
defi nes the status of historiography itself as the ontico-ontological difference
defi nes the status of fundamental ontology. That is necessarily ignored by
later English-reading groups influenced by Gramsci, so that the subaltern
remained an object of study rather than a subject to learn from in a medi-
ated way because the subaltern classes cannot be—unless you have a Chris-
tian theory of suffering, keeping consciousness intact—unmediated teachers.
Gramsci, therefore, said in the Notebooks that the intellectuals must be instru-
mentalized in order to produce the subaltern intellectual, in order to produce
a proletarian intellectual who is unmarked by a prejudice against the subal-
tern. And the instrumentalization of the intellectual has to be in the format
of a master-disciple dialectic following Hegel, of course, where the disciple is
the intellectual and the master is not the subaltern, but what has been trans-
lated as the cultural environment. I fear that the word “cultural” is not the
best word to be used and that would lead us into a much longer discussion
of the hopeless culturalization of Gramsci. But I am not going to go there. I
think I want to move on to the next question. However, one more thing and
this is in a piece that is recently out in the Columbia Press Collection edited
by Rosalind Morris. Since you talk about a trajectory and I am influenced
by Gramsci, let me repeat that “Can the Subaltern Speak?” was given as a
lecture before I had actually read Subaltern Studies, and then that got covered
over because of the powerful influence of the Subaltern Studies people on me.
But in that essay, I was moving more under the influence of the notion of the
necessity of class consciousness in order for subaltern resistance to be recog-
nized as such that we fi nd in Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire.
BB: Your essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” is one of the most important
texts for the field “postcolonial studies.” In this essay you proposed a radical
re-imagination of the subaltern—on the one hand you argued that Gramsci’s
“work on the ‘subaltern classes’ extends the class-position/class-conscious-
ness argument isolated in The Eighteenth Brumaire.” And on the other you
also emphasized the “singular” position of the gendered subaltern subject.
We were wondering if you would like to revisit the essay in light of this
productive tension, and if you could tell us about the way you look at that
essay after almost two decades of its publication.
GCS: That essay is not really post-colonial as such. I was looking at female
subalternity as singular, rather than necessarily at a subaltern class. And
subalternity is not in the state, so post- or anti-colonialism is incidental there.
(Recently, Ursula Apitzsch has pointed at Gramsci’s correspondence with
Giulia and Tatiana Schucht where he speaks of individual if not singular
subalternity.) Also, the essay is concerned with pre-colonial determinations
of gendered subaltern psychobiography. Sumit Sarkar has been kind enough
to say that this is almost the only subalternist work that looks at pre-colonial
material. It is much more a critique of the Hindu orthodoxy around sati, and
then the middle class displacement of that ideology into a world where sati
itself had no reality—that world of Bhubaneswari Bhaduri—than anything
about the British as such. And I have remained in that position, Baidik,
because I fi nd it without any intellectual or political effort at all. I fi nd it much
more didactically alive for me in my everyday. To think of the fact that I
belong to a ferocious majority with a terrible history of both cultural produc-
tion and criminal social tradition, grandeur built on cruelty, and therefore,
the entire trajectory of knowledge as property and power, which is millenni-
al—I fi nd that to be a much greater didactic corrective than the few hundred
years of colonization, which I was smart enough to recognize early on that if
it is not recognized as enabling violation, we are in bad faith. So therefore,
it is really not a postcolonial essay in the sense of focusing on a critique of
colonization. What I am trying to say there, if anything, is that two groups in
such a contrast—the Hindu orthodoxy as well as the Indo-British reformers
and legalists (there is a difference between the two segments of the portman-
teau designations)—that both of them, in fact, had no interest in accessing
the protocols of gendered agency. That is what my basic position was then,
which may be revised when I read Ranajit Guha’s recent book Daya. Now I
have subsequently tried to place it within my own intellectual autobiography,
my stereotype of myself. And I have noted that I went to my own class. It is
now well known that the woman in the case was my grandmother’s sister.
So, because I wanted access I went into the family. I do not particularly
admire this, although I understand this, and it warns me against identitari-
anism because it was basically an identitarian move. I was smart enough to
know that identitarianism was intellectually harmful. So, at least, I kept her
identity—her kinship inscription—a secret. And I moved from that fi rst move.
I moved from studying the subaltern to learning from, which is the hardest
possible task, especially because given the complete lack of interest of the
State or National Civil Service in terms of training primary school teachers,
and the domestic and international civil society’s unexamined patronizing
of it, my attempt to learn from the subaltern how to produce subaltern intel-
lectuals, has to remain in a sector which I disapprove of—classic description
of a double bind -- private sector voluntarism. It was in that situation that I
went to Gramsci’s thoughts on this in the Prison Notebooks— I did not know
that I was doing precisely that, I discovered the deep affi nity teaching Gram-
sci in New York. When I taught Gramsci before, all the way from Texas
in the late 1970s, my own subalternist educational work had not matured
enough for me to make this connection. Also some specific Gramsci people
in Italy, especially women, Sergia Adamo and Giorgio Baratta saying that
in recognizing the need for the production of the subaltern intellectual I had
taken Gramsci somewhere, which I think was very kind and affectionate of
them. But nonetheless, that is what made me look again at Gramsci, and
beginning to teach him carefully I realized what I was doing. You cannot
do this kind of thing— if you think to yourself, oops! I am teaching Gramsci
or I am doing Freire or I am doing Dewey or I am doing Montessori. No.
You are going there because you are trying to not learn from a Gramsci or a
Freire who is continuous with you as a university academic but as I said, in
a mediated way from people who cannot, in fact, “teach” in a way that you
can recognize. You have to know, quite unsentimentally, that whatever they
may say themselves, they are deeply affected by the history of which you are
both agent and victim, as are they, in a different way. The gender argument
of subalternity is different yet. In the old dispensation the subaltern allowed
us to stop outside of capital logic. In the thinking that I am now describing,
gender allows us to think outside of the abstract logic of citizenship alone. So
that it is in thinking of gendered subalternity that we step—at risk—we step
from the abstract structures of citizenship, the circuits of hegemony, in other
words, agency talk—very important—into subjection. From agent to subject.
Gendered subalternity is not easy to track. The new gendered subaltern I
have defi ned in a conversation with Vinayak Chaturvedi in terms of TRIPS
and TRIMS and global super-exploitation.
Citizenship and the civil rights of the subaltern are still in the realm of
agency even when gender sensitive. It is necessarily somewhat gender blind
because it cannot step back from the realm of rights and agency. Even when
we are most self-consciously gendered, in terms of citizenship within which
we take gendered oppression and make a case, we are somewhat gender-
blind because gendering is upstream from the State. The State has a history,
the history of gendering is as we are constituted in sexual difference and fall
into a so-called “cultural” field of negotiations abstracted in terms of that
difference. Reproductive heteronormativity is our oldest institution of valida-
tion and we are in a double bind with it. It cannot be corrected, it can only
be approached. And so, the gendered subaltern lives in another space and
Gramsci’s argument about “inventory without traces” is taken into that arena
because psychoanalysis is also aligned with reproductive heteronormativity.
Its corrections too are within that alignment. Reproductive heteronormativ-
ity contains psychoanalysis. Both Irigaray and Judith Butler are aware of this.
Gramsci, necessarily not thinking of this, says that sociology might now have
to produce shorter essay-like things which are more literary because of this
methodico-methodological difference. Perhaps Shahid Amin is the one who
has an intuition of this in the way he writes. That is the Gramscian risk.
BB: In a talk titled “The Trajectory of the Subaltern in My Work” (2004) you
have pointed out two configurations of the subaltern in your work: through
your engagement with Ranajit Guha’s work and your “loose bonding” with
the Subaltern Studies group that leads to the project of “learning to learn
from below”; and your engagement with the “new subaltern” that allows
the “homoeopathy of self abstraction” in the public sphere in order to con-
nect with the state. We were wondering if you could tell us how these two
moments extend the legacies of Gramsci in your recent project—which you
describe in the talk as critical negotiation with the “abstract understanding of
secularism and the state”—and, if we can extend this insight, how you see the
relevance of Gramsci (if any) in this age of globalization/post-globalization.
GCS: Post-globalization is not a word I would use because in spite of peo-

ple trying to locate globalization in the earliest attempts to think a world
and systematize it, we must also, à la Lenin’s work on imperialism, where
he so clearly pointed out that capitalism was in a moment of Aufhebung
into commercial capital, realize that globalization is an Aufhebung of the
self-determination of capital. When Lenin is writing about the defi nition
of fi nance capital is still authorized by our view of commercial capital.
When the commercial banks and the investment banks were collapsed in
the US . . . that was the beginning of an upheaval which showed the inter-
connectedness of globalized capitalism. In this respect, post-globalization
is the articulation of an unexamined desire, it needs a reality check. It
is for the future to defi ne us as post-something. As a claim, it is useless.
What has happened to the Gramscian project within globalization? Can
one talk about it? Yes, I think we can talk about it because the subaltern
is a position without identity. Remnants of identity must claim to each of
the forms of appearance of this position because there is no position that
stands by itself. All class positions are always contradicted by identitarian
rags hanging from their abstract structure so that the position is also dif-
ferent. And I took it to the gendered subaltern in terms of crossing what
may be called the agency-subject barrier. What we can see in globalization
is the creation of new forms of subalternization. Globalization imposes
an uneven economic simultaneity upon varieties of political formation.
The unevenness of the economic—seemingly simultaneous and therefore
unredressable can only be controlled by secularist absolutisms—from
benevolent to malevolent. Religion goes from social justice to terrorism
as opposition to absolutism. Islamism in Central Asia after communism
is a rich example. If you want to see new forms of subalternization here
according to Gramsci’s classic description—no access to the hegemonic
structures of the state, Kathleen Collins’s book Clan Politics and Regime
Transition in Central Asia will give you a lead.
This calls for a re-thinking of secularism that exceeds the boundaries
of our conversation. Despite the vigorous argument of Indian secularists, I
don’t think India is a model for secularism. On the one side are the socialist
absolutisms declining into Central Asian corruption and, on the other side,
the great historical model of China. I am just coming from a theatre of new
subalternizations in China, and it doesn’t have much to do with religion.
Another kind of subalternization today lodges in the so-called illegal immi-
grant groups, they may use religion as redress, again, but I don’t think the
remedy there is secularism. To the extent that religion oppresses gender in

these groups, we can have local struggles, but the issue of secularism as such
is not the fi nal solution in Gramscian terms. Where I deal with secularism is
in terms of the unexamined class-specific privatization of the intuition of the
transcendental, and that is not through Gramsci.
BB: If we can go back to my earlier question once again, the point you make
about the “metonymization” of the self.
GCS: Oh, the Santa Barbara talk, which has been so YouTubed? Everybody
has seen it. I feel very embarrassed. But, yes, the metonymization, I don’t
want to call it code-switching because if you call it code-switching that is a
rational choice reduction—an existential impoverishment. By metonymiza-
tion, what I was trying to describe is the part of the practice of those who
have the leisure and class position to be morally outraged for the sake of
the world at large rather than self-interested because of the need for free-
dom from oppression. This seems clear, doesn’t it? Now, if we think about
the way in which people like that whole generation, not just Georges Sorel
or Walter Benjamin but people like Rosa Luxemburg—thought about the
importance of the general strike because the agent of the general strike is—
not the ideologue. But what does the ideologue do? That is what I am talking
about here. Those of us who become “activist ideologues”—whatever that
word activism means—inhabit, the methodico-methodological difference as
best as we can. In that situation we inevitably enter engaged collectivities
by emphasizing— this is the synecdoche part—one part of our stereotype,
of our agential selves. This has to do with tremendous intuition of the pro-
duction of the subaltern intellectual. When I try minimally to engage in
that Gramscian model of work my self-metonymization reduces itself of a
claiming of equality through the formula: you have one vote and I have one
vote. The arithmeticization of democracy—it is nonsense if taken as essence.
Nonetheless, I metonymize myself as such. This is a declaration of figuration;
it is not a rational choice. The project is to restore to the subaltern, through
infrastructural engagements, the possibility of a broader spectrum of self-
metonymization without criminal violence against them. In that interest the
specific metonym is part of a war of maneuver. This is by way of a contrast
with the protective and benevolent ex-zamindar types who join hands with
the World Social Forum—very far indeed from the Gramscian project—I call
it a feudality without feudalism. Their alter-globalization European associ-
ates play with them as if they themselves are the ethnicized subaltern without
realizing that there is a representational problem here, democratic structures
hardly exist in the situation of the benevolent feudal, conscientized feudal,
superficially lefticized feudal, Chomskianized feudal class, without actu-
ally existing feudalism, but with affective feudalism still in place. This is
exactly opposed to the Gramscian imperative. That particular possibility of
broader self-metonymization, which is extra-moral in the Nietzschean terms,

is quenched in the benevolence of an unacknowledged feudality. It is not
without interest that my schools after twenty years of work in the fi rst state
were closed because one of the young boys showed a modicum of judgment
about good and bad education. Armed struggle is okay, there is goon-politics
on both sides. To distract them with radical phraseology is okay, I suppose,
when they are fighting. To describe the phenomenon through Euro-US radi-
cal phraseology is as foolish as it is wrong, but it’s okay. This other thing—the
possibility of much broader self-metonymization on the part of the subaltern,
remotely indicated by this boy’s transformed consciousness —this intangible
thing, a minimal representation, perhaps, of what Gramsci wanted to arouse
in the subaltern, seemed altogether threatening to the canny old ex-zamin-
dar, the benevolent despot. To produce this requires so much involvement
that you can’t do collective world-saving under these auspices. Nobody seems
particularly interested in what Gramsci calls a disciple-relationship with the
subaltern environment and I call learning to learn from below. Right from
the fi rst day, the fi rst encounter, the bourgeois activist knows how to solve
the problem. And I know immediately, they will never learn from below.
The least that can happen is that they will perhaps submit to me and go my
way. This is the most difficult part of my intellectual project—supplementing
vanguardism by expanding the possibility of self-metonymization.
BB: You have often talked about your “field work” in your school in the
Adivasi areas of West Bengal as an integral part of your intellectual life. Does
this experience allow you to rethink the Gramscian notion of the organic
intellectual?
GCS: When I wrote “Righting Wrongs” I didn’t realize that the power of the
feudal personalities keep the adivasi as close to anthropological “purity” as
possible. What I was looking at was a simulacrum. I was looking at a removal
from the stream of history, not by history as such, but by the desire of the
feudals without feudalism to remain benevolent by way of an earlier semiotic
field: fighting the police, fighting the party on behalf of the “serfs”—public
interest litigation—imposing upon them absurd agricultural projects thought
up by retired, old codgers from agricultural schools, completely unmindful
of chemical fertilizers, I could go on. This was the version of benevolent
feudal intervention from above that I mistook for the “nature” of tribal “cul-
ture.” God knows the benevolent despots took me in! Those tribals were
in the hyper-real. They were not acting out cultural conformity. They were
obliged to remain faithful to the idea of their masters. This is why the UN-
style feminists dislike the fact that I don’t dress ethnic and talk global.
BB: Does your experience allow you to rethink the Gramscian notion of the
“organic intellectual?”
GCS: Sorry! I forgot that completely! What is there to rethink? Gramsci

does not think that the organic intellectual is necessarily a good guy. What
he thinks is that every mode of production throws up an organic intellec-
tual who supports that mode of production. His only example is the organic
intellectual of capitalism. Organic for Gramsci does not mean Coleridge.
It is more like organon, organization—a system. The contrast between tradi-
tional and organic intellectual does not really hold as he goes on writing.
I am sure if he had had the time and health to come out of jail and write
a book, there would have been negotiation between these two worlds. It
would not have been a binary opposition. We take these notes to himself,
by a very smart and sick man in jail, as defi nitions. Hegemony, war of
maneuver, war of position, organic intellectuals, intellectual—everything
is what I call medicine and poison in Gramsci, because he is thinking, he
is thinking.
Pharmakon is more complicated because in Derrida’s discussion, Socrates
is the pharmakeus. Mine—and to an extent Gramsci’s—is a vulgarization of
the Socratic position. There is, however, one important distinction to keep
in mind: we are speaking of medicine and poison, not cure and poison.
Medicine can be poisonously used or can become poison because of your
organic connection with a specific mode of production, in the Gramscian
sense. The traditional organic contrast, if it holds in Gramsci, holds only in
terms of modes of production, pre-capitalistic, generally Catholic (catholic
is not a mode of production, of course, so Gramsci sees its ideological force
as capital determines itself). Remember, Marx also talks about the clergy
in terms of ideological production. If you want to keep that moving—intel-
lectuals organic to Catholicism and intellectuals organic to capitalism—that
is the traditional organic divide as commonly understood, as far as I am
concerned. Then the new intellectual, who has been transferred by the post-
Togliatti English translators from the end—the fi nal paragraph of the specula-
tion about education—in that particular notebook to an insignificant position
in the middle. Why and how? There is no critical apparatus to explain. It has
been transferred into a kind of hodgepodge middle space. Page 10, upper left
hand corner of the paperback of the Selections from the Prison Notebooks.
The New Intellectual is a different thing. She or he (Gramsci knew female
intellectuals, though his mode is benevolent patriarchal) is, if you like, an
organic intellectual of democratic socialism. I write about this in the Intro-
duction to my book Aesthetic Education in the Age of Globalization. I believe the
argument is tested right in front of us and that to me is a more interesting
thing. The sentimental academic-populist version of the organic intellectual
takes the counter-intuitive in Gramsci and turns it into something that is no
more than commonsensical.
BB: This brings us to our next question . . .

GCS: It seems to me that you have really linked these questions very well
because I seem to be answering always the next one or beginning to answer
the next one.
BB: Do you see Gramsci’s influence on your ideas about education?
GCS: Yes. Yes. That is a very good question. Gramsci had two forays into
education. First, the Factory Council days before his imprisonment. And
then, in jail he had the time to consider why the Turin strike failed and put
his mind to the problem of producing the subaltern intellectual.
Gramsci is careful from the start not to base epistemological authority
in the unions. This is the one place where he stands with Rosa Luxemburg.
Unlike Luxemburg, though, Gramsci insists on taking the epistemological
task (long run) away from the unions (short run) and makes epistemologi-
cal transformation the task of the new intellectual. This he begins to think
about more in terms of the available class mobile system of education rather
than an alternative project in the factories. And I myself would say that that
was right on target because no alternative proposed as an alternative ever
remains an alternative. The only thing that you lose is the weight of amoral
history concerned with nothing but itself. That is a great advantage to have.
For example, one of my former “advisors” whom I used to take into the vil-
lages and who could only ever stay there for two or three days would say: if
you make them make up diagrams themselves they will learn much better.
But the part of our mind that can connect the abstract and the concrete in
terms not of art-practice (that, funnily enough gets damaged less, is tougher),
but in terms of cognitive performance, has been destroyed by centuries of
prohibition of intellectual labor. Could my “advisor” step out of his own
upper middle-class production? Not for a minute. This is why Gramsci says
that the subaltern environment must be the intellectual’s teacher. It is a sabo-
taging argument, as it were.
Gramsci obviously is not perfect. He is not an educationist tying up things.
The entire business of taking Latin away from the Latinitas of Mussolini,
nonetheless, has a pretty old-fashioned argument behind it, but the important
thing is to sabotage it to a different end, the old-fashioned tools have lasted. I
am not a Gramscian fundamentalist. But on the other hand, the idea that you
insert these folks into a good way of teaching the national and state curricu-
lum fi nds resonance in that intuition of Gramsci’s: the instrumentalization of
the intellectual, the new intellectual is in the master–disciple position, in the
disciple position—all of that is the methodical part. The methodological part
is to use the established system because, if you simplify de-subalternization
into mere class mobility, the subaltern does not have a chance in hell with a
non-formal education. One of my associates in Hong Kong, she is a young
woman who was good enough to say she was influenced by my thought, ran
a wonderful NGO. She said at one point: How can this be? Where there is
so much education and has been for long, so the students are getting to the
electoral age. How is it that they voted BJP? And I said: what does learn-
ing Maths have to do with thinking democratically? Du Bois also, not only
Gramsci, says this. Just after Emancipation, says Du Bois, the Negro needs
food and shelter but they must at once learn to communicate with the stars.
What does that mean? It is that engagement with that historical system of
education which the bourgeois intellectuals, who are themselves very well
educated within that system, dismiss as producing traditional intellectuals
(does not have to if the teaching has changed). So it is an activity- intensive
rather than curriculum-intensive project and there I am with Gramsci with-
out being a Gramscian fundamentalist. I think there are areas where . . . I
mean Gramsci himself changes his mind about the relationship between
national languages and dialects in the wonderful last Notebook printed. But
that is too “thick” a topic for now.
BB: And my last question, how do you revisit “Can the Subaltern Speak?”
now?
GCS: Okay! First of all, the original version needed another round of edit-
ing that my editors did not provide. People fi x on that “White Man Saving
Brown Women from Brown Men” sentence as if it is the central message.
But the rhetorical moment there is that I say I do not know anything about
South Asia, so, I take Freud as my monitory model. If I can construct it as a
sentence then I can go forth to construct an object. Just as Freud wrote the
sentence “a child is being beaten,” so can I write this sentence. Tada, right?
And recently I saw that what I was doing was taking a white man (Freud)
and using him to save brown women, namely the satis, from brown men,
namely, Hindu orthodoxy. So, in a deep sense, I was myself implicated. No
one else has noticed it because if they had, they would have killed me. But I
looked at it and I also realized that that is the one thing that Bhubaneswari
is not doing. Her charge was to kill a white man. So, that’s where the double
bind between ethics and politics came in. I think the one thing that I do think
about that incident is that it taught me to get beyond knowledge as power.
By looking at foremothers—the essay “Foremothers” is on the web and is now
being published by Susan Gubar.
To learn this lesson of extreme politics, suicide politics, body-as-inscrip-
tion politics, to inhabit the cusp of ethics and politics, and the impossibility of
being ethical and the impossibility of being political and producing oneself
as response—this is what today, I really take away from that event. I had a
huge writer’s block when I fi rst wrote it in the eighties; it was not written
easily. And so, then, the recent discovery through Nayanika Mukherjee with
whom in a kind of casual conversation, I revealed that I have photographs
of the Birangonas—the rape victims of the Bangladesh war—as she reminded
me they were called. I had forgotten that mother and I were there at that time
and mother was really the much greater figure and activist at that stage.
BB: Do you still have those photographs?
GCS: Photographs? Indeed I have them. So, Nayanika came to me and she
took the photos. There were eighteen photos. They were just in my album.
They were not part of any archive. In 1973, okay? So, she took them and she
organized them. She gave credit due to the University Press and interviewed
me, which I have just edited. At any rate in talking to Nayanika, I said no,
Bhubaneswari is not the origin of the turn to the subaltern. This is the secret
that I never unearthed, until the casual conversation with Nayanika. It is the
scene of being with mother, where I owe, as a daughter, no activist responsibil-
ity. My father, who died in 1955, had destroyed his extremely brilliant career
as a Civil Surgeon in Dhaka in 1940—in about two seconds. He had been
asked to give false evidence at a rape trial. So, there was a whole itinerary of
heteronormative familial connections drawing me there in terms of a much
bigger scene which was non-productive, which was precisely not fieldwork.
This is very unusual. And talking to Nayanika, I realized my stereotype of
my autobiography, that it started with a foremother, was the second take. The
Birangonas will remain the open secret, the agential articulation of which
became “Can the Subaltern Speak?” and, then, turning away from family
to other people’s children—an accessible democratic signature—to the hard
work of learning from below the production of the subaltern intellectual.
©Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak Columbia University

Contributors
Baidik Bhattacharya is assistant professor of English at the University

of Delhi, India. His essays on colonial and postcolonial theory and litera-
ture have appeared in journals like Postcolonial Studies, Novel, and Inter-
ventions. He is currently completing a book manuscript tentatively titled
Postcolonial Writing in the Era of Globalization.
Paolo Capuzzo is associate professor of contemporary history at the Uni-

versity of Bologna. He has been researcher at the universities of Vienna,
TU-Berlin, Université Libre in Brussels, University of Leicester and pro-
fessor at the universities of Barcelona and Tour. Among his recent pub-
lications are Culture del consumo (Bologna, Il Mulino, 2006), and Studi
gramsciani nel mondo. Gli studi culturali coedited with G. Vacca and G.
Schirru (Bologna, Il Mulino, 2009).
Iain Chambers presently teaches cultural, postcolonial, and Mediterra-

nean studies at the Oriental University in Naples, Italy. His most recent
book is Mediterranean Crossings: The Politics of an Interrupted Modernity
(2008). He is also editor (with Lidia Curti) of The Post-colonial Question.
Common Skies, Divided Horizons (1996) and the volume Esercizi di Potere.
Gramsci, Said e il postcoloniale (2006), and is presently preparing a work on
the musical “mappings” of the Mediterranean.
Partha Chatterjee is professor of anthropology at Columbia University,

New York, and honorary professor, Centre for Studies in Social Sciences,
Calcutta. He is a founding member of the Subaltern Studies editorial
group. His books include Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World (1986),
The Nation and Its Fragments (1993), The Politics of the Governed (2004), and
Lineages of Political Society (2010).
Pheng Cheah is professor of rhetoric at the University of California at

Berkeley. He is the author of Inhuman Conditions: On Cosmopolitanism and
Human Rights (Harvard University Press, 2006) and Spectral Nationality:
Passages of Freedom from Kant to Postcolonial Literatures of Liberation (Colum-
bia University Press, 2003), and the co-editor of several book collections,
including Derrida and the Time of the Political (Duke University Press, 2009),
Grounds of Comparison: Around the Work of Benedict Anderson (Routledge,
2003), and Cosmopolitics—Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation (University
of Minnesota Press, 1998). He is currently completing a book on theories
of the world and world literature from the postcolonial South in an era
of global fi nancialization. Also in progress is a book on globalization and
world cinema from the three Chinas, focusing on the fi lms of Jia Zhangke,
Tsai Ming-liang, and Fruit Chan.
Sandro Mezzadra works as an associate professor of political theory in the

Department of Politics, Institutions, History at the University of Bologna.
He has been research fellow at the Humboldt Universität, Berlin; in the
Centre for Cultural Research at the University of Western Sydney; at the
Fondation Maison des sciences de l’homme, Paris; and at Duke University.
His research work has focused on the classical modern European political
philosophy as well as on the history of political, social, and legal sciences
in Germany between the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries. In the last
decade his work has particularly centered on the relations between global-
ization, migration and citizenship, as well as on postcolonial theory and
criticism. He is an active participant in the discussion within the tradition of
Italian autonomist Marxism and (post)operaismo and one of the founders
of the UniNomade network (http://uninomade.org/).
Walter D. Mignolo is William H. Wannamaker Professor of Literature

and Romance Studies, Professor of Cultural Anthropology, Spanish and
Latin American Studies, at Duke University. In 2010 he was appointed
International Board Member for the six-year project “Time, Memory and
Representation,” Sorderton University, Sweden. He also serves on the
Advisory Board of The Hong Kong Advanced Institute for Cross Dis-
ciplinary Studies (College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences), at the
City University of Hong-Kong, China. In October 2010, he lectured at
the Bruno Kreisky Foundation in Vienna and he delivered the Annual
Norbert Lerner’s Lecture Series at the Universidad Diego Portales, Chile.
Additionally, he was the 2010–2011 Visiting Fellow at the Institute of
Advanced Studies at Warwick University, England. He also curated the
exhibit “Esteticas descoloniales,” which opened in Bogota, Colombia, on
November 10, 2010, and at Duke University in May 2011. His next book,
The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options will
be released in October 2011.
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, university professor at Columbia Uni-

versity, has been profoundly influenced by the work of Antonio Gramsci
in the area of the epistemological performance of Marxism and the pro-
duction of the subaltern intellectual. His influence will be felt again in her
forthcoming book An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization (Har-
vard University Press).
Neelam Srivastava is senior lecturer in postcolonial literature at New-

castle University (UK). She is the author of Secularism in the Postcolonial
Indian Novel: National and Cosmopolitan Narratives in English (Routledge,
2007). She has published essays on South Asian literature in English, the
fi lmmaker Gillo Pontecorvo, and the cultural history of Italian colonial-
ism. She is currently the coordinator of an International Research Net-

work, “Postcolonial Translation: The Case of South Asia,” funded by the
Leverhulme Trust.
Rajeswari Sunder Rajan is Global Distinguished Professor in the

Department of English at New York University. She has been a Senior
Fellow at the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi, and
taught in the English faculty at the University of Oxford where she was
Professorial Fellow of Wolfson College. Her publications include Real and
Imagined Women: Gender, Culture and Postcolonialism (1993), The Scandal of
the State: Women, Law and Citizenship in Postcolonial India (2003), and the
co-edited volume The Crisis of Secularism in India (2007).
Robert J. C. Young is Julius Silver Professor of English and Comparative

Literature at New York University. His White Mythologies: Writing History
and the West (1990), Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Culture, Theory and Race
(Routledge, 1995), and Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction (Black-
well, 2001), have been some of the most influential books in the field of
postcolonial studies. He has also written Postcolonialism: A Very Short Intro-
duction (Oxford, 2003), The Idea of English Ethnicity (Blackwell, 2008), and
is currently writing a book on translation. Prior to moving to New York,
Robert Young was professor of English and critical theory and a fellow of
Wadham College, Oxford University. He is general editor of the quarterly
Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies. His work has been
translated into twenty languages.
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Index
A citizen/citizenship 13, 81, 108, 109, 113,

agency 29, 61, 70, 166, 177, 183, 186, 114, 115, 118n11, 127, 130, 135,
224, 225 166, 222, 225
Algeria 56, 76–7, 102 civil society 3, 4, 7, 8, 47, 58, 87, 97n7, 115,
Althusser, Louis 107, 193, 205 119, 127–128, 130, 134, 135–137,
Ambedkar, B.R. 175–76, 185, 188n9, 143, 146, 166, 179, 207, 224
189n27 Croce, Benedetto 35, 36, 39, 40, 44, 45,
Anantha Murthy, U.R. 165, 167, 17073, 47, 52n9, 60–61, 95, 106
175, 176, 179, 180, 188n11,
188n12, 189n16 D
Anidjar, Gil 103–104, 105, 115, decoloniality 191, 197
Appadurai, Arjun 80 Deleuze, Gilles 109, 117n5
Arac, Jonathan 97n3 Derrida, Jacques 109, 161, 229
Arendt, Hannah 154 Du Bois, W.E.B. 55, 62, 66, 67, 231,
Aricó, José 204, 205, 206 exile 18, 34, 62, 77, 92,
Asad, Talal 108, 111, 112, 113, 115,
116 F
Fanon, Franz 2, 3, 6, 12, 55–7, 60, 62,
B 63–64, 68, 70, 71–74, 75, 76, 77,
bhakti 169, 181, 182–183 78, 78n2, 78n3, 78n6, 79n12, 137,
“black Marxism” 70 174, 175, 176, 177, 178, 189n20,
Bolshevik 37, 38, 50, 211 203, 204, 208–209, 213, 214, 215
Bordiga, Amadeo 20–21, 36, 38, 51n7 Fascist/Fascism 12, 20, 24, 25, 36, 38, 40,
Brennan, Timothy 2, 7, 82, 97n13, 176, 51n2, 56, 103,
185 Foucault, Michel 84, 102, 109
C G
Cabral, Amilcar 70, 73, 137 Gandhi, M. K. 3–4, 14n4, 49, 121, 171,
“Can the Subaltern Speak?” 11, 13, 31, 175, 176, 187n2, 189n27, 209,
32, 188n13, 223, 231, 232 216n25
caste 13, 32n7, 90, 122, 134, 165–171, Geertz, Clifford 103, 108
173–176, 178, 179–186, 188n9, Gobetti, Piero 35, 47, 95
188n11, 189n22, 189n25 Guha, Ranajit 7, 9–11, 31, 119, 121, 132,
Catholic Church 4, 58, 60, 102, 104, 209, 216n23, 216n25, 222, 224, 226
168–169, 187n7
Chakrabarty, Dipesh 176, 185, 222 H
Chatterjee, Partha 12, 14n4, 79n11, 83, Hegel, G.W.F. 91, 141, 145, 201, 204,
166, 187n5, 207, 216n24 207, 223
252 Index
hegemony 5, 6, 7–8, 10, 11, 19, 24, 28, 32, nationalism 19, 22, 25, 28, 41, 55, 56, 57,
39, 41, 43, 47, 49, 50, 51, 53n30, 58, 62, 65, 67, 78n5, 81, 85, 96
60–62, 63–64, 70, 75, 76, 77, 79n9, national-popular 7, 12, 58, 60, 72, 73, 88,
82, 84, 85, 86, 93, 97n7, 97n8, 101, 89, 91, 97n9, 97n11, 146, 147,
102, 103, 104, 105, 107, 113, 117, 180, 185, 206
119, 125, 127, 135, 136, 140, 143, Naxalite 10, 30
145, 146, 165, 166, 167, 168, 170, Negri, Antonio 42, 43, 80, 81–82, 109
171, 183, 186, 197, 200, 203, 205, Négritude 55–56, 71–73, 76, 77, 78n2,
208, 212, 225, 229 Nehru, Jawaharlal 69, 166, 169, 209
Heidegger, Martin 117, 154, 185 Nietzsche, Friedrich 107, 111, 228
Hobsbawm, Eric 168, 177
O
I organic/organicity 10, 45, 58, 59, 64, 70,

Italian Communist Party 34, 35, 36, 37, 72, 74, 90, 106, 107, 122, 140, 145,
40, 42, 43, 51n6, 52n9, 52n11, 148, 150, 152, 172, 179, 180, 183,
57, 199 229 definition of 139
organic intellectual 11, 12, 13, 29, 47, 56,
J 57, 58, 60, 61, 62, 67, 68, 71, 75,
James, C.L.R. 69, 70, 78n3, 213 77, 137, 138, 145, 146, 149, 151,
158, 161, 165, 178, 180, 181, 182,
K 184, 185, 199, 214, 228–230; defi-
Kant, Immanuel 201, 204 nition and types of 140–144
Kaviraj, Sudipta 125, 167
P
L Padmore, George 12, 55–57, 62, 64, 70,
Latour, Bruno 178, 188n11 77, 78, 79n13
Lenin, V.I. 5, 18, 20, 37, 50, 51n7, 61, 70, Parthasarathy, Indira 165, 170, 181–187,
121, 191, 211, 226 189n18, 189n25
Luxemburg, Rosa 36, 227, 230 passive revolution 63, 79n11, 82, 89,
125, 126, 127, 128, 134, 135,
M 136, 145
Mariátegui, José Carlos 17, 24, 191, political society 58, 127, 128, 130–131,
194–202, 205, 208, 209, 215n1, 133–136, 205
216n18, 216n24, 216n26
Marx, Karl 24, 39, 44, 45, 46, 53n26, R
57, 82, 96n2, 116, 119, 120, 121, religion 12, 61, 75, 77, 85, 97n9, 101,
122, 139, 141–142, 145, 154, 169, 102–105, 107–108, 110–114, 117,
170, 178, 188n13, 191, 210, 212, 118n10, 168–69, 171, 178, 181,
216n25, 223, 229 183, 200, 213, 226, 227
Marxism 1, 9, 18, 19, 23, 31, 42, 44, 60–61, Risorgimento 6, 40, 63, 67, 77, 89, 90,
62, 65, 69, 70, 91, 211–12, 213, 214 186
Mazzini, Giuseppe 22 Rosa, Asor 40–41, 43, 44, 53n23,
modernity 2, 12, 26, 41, 44, 49, 52n9, Russian Revolution 20, 22, 50
102, 103, 104, 105, 108, 110,
111, 112–113, 114, 115, 116, 117, S
118n10, 119, 123, 126, 134, 167, Said, Edward W. 2, 7–9, 12, 18–19, 23,
180, 188n11, 192, 196, 208, 209, 33n10, 48, 82–83, 84–87, 90, 91,
214 92, 93–96, 97n3, 97n4, 97n8,
Mussolini, Benito 20, 25, 26, 27, 28, 38, 97n13, 97n14, 102, 103, 106, 112,
197, 230 113, 116, 221
Sanyal, Kalyan 122–24
N Sardinia 1, 12, 17–18, 22, 23, 26, 27–28,
Nandy, Ashis 216n25 32n3, 33n15, 191, 194
Index 253
secularism 12, 85, 86, 88, 90, 94, 97n5, Togliatti, Palmiro. 34–40, 51n1, 52n8,
102, 103, 104, 105, 107, 110, 52n11, 52n14, 53n29, 222, 229
111–114, 117, 118n10, 226, 227 untouchable 165, 166–168, 170, 171–176,
“Southern Question, the” 4–6, 11, 12, 22, 178, 179, 181–186, 188n9, 188n12,
23–24, 26, 28–30, 42, 43, 49, 94, 189n17, 189n25, 189n27
109, 188n14, 193, 194, 195–197,
199, 200–201, 210 V
Stalin, Joseph 32n6, 35, 37, 38 Viswanathan, Gauri, 102–03
subaltern/subalternity 1, 2, 7, 9–12, 13,
18, 21, 23, 29–32, 33n17, 41, 42, W
49–50, 53n22, 56, 57, 58, 64, 65, Weber, Max 117
76, 82, 91, 104, 106, 109, 110, West Bengal 120, 222, 228,
115, 119, 132, 143, 145, 166, 168, Williams, Raymond 7, 62, 84, 87, 97n6,
176–180, 185, 186–87, 188n13, 221
188n15, 194, 197, 208, 211,
221–228, 230, 232 X
Subaltern Studies 7, 9–11, 12, 30, 31, Xiaoping, Deng 155
43, 83, 119, 145, 176, 186, 207,
208–209, 210, 216n23, 217n27, Z
221, 222, 223, 226 Zedong, Mao 24, 30, 121
Zhangke, Jia 13, 138, 144, 146–149,
T 150–152, 158, 161, 163n19,
Tamilnadu 165, 170 163n20

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The Postcolonial Gramsci

5. Caribbean–English Passages: Intertextuality in a Postcolonial Tradition by Tobias Döring

NEW YORK AND LONDON

Simultaneously published in the UK

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

© 2012 Taylor & Francis

Typeset in Baskerville by IBT Global.

Trademark Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks,

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

ISBN13: 978-0-415-87481-6 (hbk)

List of Figures vii

Introduction: The Postcolonial Gramsci 1

2 Provincializing the Italian Reading of Gramsci 34

3 The Travels of the Organic Intellectual: The Black Colonized

4 The Secular Alliance: Gramsci, Said and the Postcolonial

5 The “Unseen Order”: Religion, Secularism and Hegemony 101

7 Entering the World from an Oblique Angle: On Jia Zhangke

8 Questioning Intellectuals: Reading Caste with Gramsci in

Two Indian Literary Texts 165

9 Mariátegui and Gramsci in “Latin” America: Between

Interview with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak 221

List of Contributors 233

7.3 Tao dressed as a fl ight attendant. 155

7.4 Animation of Tao flying past Tiananmen Square. 156

SPW 1 = Antonio Gramsci, Selections from Political Writings, 1910–1920.

SPW 2 = Antonio Gramsci, Selections from Political Writings, 1921–1926. Ed.

Neelam Srivastava and Baidik Bhattacharya

book Wars of Position, warns of the perils of “decontextualizing” Gramsci

Gramsci and the Colonial Question

issues in the Prison Notebooks. He developed these reflections over a period of

modate and elaborate on unexpected locations and peoples, and to think of

Gramsci on the Southern Question

The “poverty” of the South was inexplicable to the popular masses of

Gramsci on Italian Imperialism and the Civilizing Mission

Gramsci and the Postcolonial

Said and Gramsci

a class is dominant in two ways, i.e. “leading” and “dominant.” It leads

exercise political leadership or hegemony. (SPNB 57)

The theoretical presupposition behind Gramsci’s argument here is a dis-

If Orientalist discourses are indeed productive, and if they shape every

Subaltern Studies and Gramsci

Far from being destroyed or rendered virtually ineffective, as was elite

The early volumes of Subaltern Studies broadly followed this structure

sciousness but more like the poststructuralist concept of the “subject-effect”;

Plan of the Book

is not the familiar argument about the misrepresentation of Gramsci; rather

worth mentioning Jane Schneider’s Italy’s “Southern Question”: Orientalism in One

Lo stato italiano . . . è stato una dittatura feroce che ha messo a ferro

tentarono di infamare col marchio di “briganti.”

The Italian state . . . was a cruel dictatorship that massacred and

trism of European Marxism itself in the 1970s and 80s.

In this way the colonial populations become the foundation on which

an argument to which he would seriously return, even with respect to Italy’s

ings on Italian history and culture.

reaches out to the historical and political formations of society at an extraor-

meridionale,” “Some Aspects of the Southern Question” (in Lo Stato operaio

The three coordinates of this sentence—the intellectuals of the North and

it was the Italian Socialist and Communist parties’ failure to provide an

1894—and second that solutions offered by nationalists, and former socialist

Syndicalism was born: the instinctive, elemental, primitive but healthy

It is misleading for Gramsci to reduce syndicalist intellectuals to mere

This position is in many respects similar to Gramsci’s own. There is not