In search of a postcolonial Gramsci: method, thought, and intellectuals

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size

Notes

1. Joseph Buttigieg, ‘Introduction’, in Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks. Volume 1, New York: Columbia University Press, 1992, in particular pp 42–64; Timothy Brennan, ‘Antonio Gramsci and Postcolonial Theory: “Southernism”’, Diaspora 10(2), 2001, pp 143–187.

2. Antonio Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, Valentino Gerratana (ed), Torino: Einaudi, 1975, p 2185 (Q23, §1).

3. A leading intellectual and Minister of Education during Fascism, Giovanni Gentile (1875–1944) was an Italian idealist philosopher, most known for his interpretation of Hegel's idealism as ‘actualism’. De Sanctis's extensive work as well was highly influenced by Hegel's thought. All major Hegelian philosophers in the first half of the twentieth century, Croce, Gentile and Gramsci looked at De Sanctis's work as a crucial point of reference and source for their thought. De Sanctis was born in 1817 and died in 1883.

4. See Joseph Buttigieg, ‘Antonio Gramsci's “Return to De Sanctis”’, in Graziella Parati and Ben Lawton (eds), Italian Cultural Studies, Boca Raton, FL: Bordighera Press, 2001, p 54.

5. See chapters 1 and 2 of my book-length study, ‘Aspetti della questione della lingua sarda attraverso la diade storia-grammatica: un approccio di tipo gramsciano’, in Giorgio Serra (ed), Antologia del Premio Gramsci: IX Edizione, Sassari: EDES, 2006 . A second revised edition is forthcoming with the title Ideas: un sentiero gramsciano da Dante alla lingua sarda comune, Sassari: EDES. See also Selenu, ‘Ives and Gramsci in Dialogue: Vernacular Subalternity, Cultural Interferences, and the Word-Thing Interdependence’, Rethinking Marxism 21(3), 2009, pp 344–354; ‘Elaborando le tracce della storia. Linguaggio, metafora e alterità in Antonio Gramsci’, in Barnaba Maj and Rossana Lista (eds), Sulla ‘traccia’ di Michel de Certeau. Interpretazioni e percorsi. Discipline Filosofiche 1, 2008, pp 115–133.

6. See my own Ideas, ch 1.

7. We know that Gramsci and Lussu had an epistolary exchange in 1926, the same year Gramsci composed his unfinished essay on the Southern Question, just before his imprisonment. The presence of Lussu (a key figure of the Brigata Sassari during World War I) is quite evident between the lines of that essay. I have also recalled the alliance between Gramsci and Lussu in my article in Rethinking Marxism 21(3), 2009, pp 344–354. On the anti-fascist and anti-colonial nature of Lussu's Sardism see also Joseph Buttigieg's introductory essay in Umberto Cardia, Il mondo che ho vissuto, Giuseppe Marci (ed), Cagliari: CUEC, 2009. The erasure of Lussu's name—along with many other anti-fascists, as well as intellectuals inspired by both Lussu and Gramsci such as Antonio Pigliaru, Michelangelo Pira, Umberto Cardia, Sergio Atzeni, etc.—in Italy and abroad is symptomatic of our age of global forgetfulness. One might also recall here the importance for Gramsci of Pais Serra's report on Sardinian conditions at the end of the nineteenth century, to which he also refers in the Prison Notebooks (Notebook 1, §43; 19, §26). On Pais Serra's report, see also Giuseppe Fiori, Antonio Gramsci: Life of a Revolutionary, Tom Nairn (trans), New York: Verso, 1990, ch 4.

8. Antonio Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, Valentino Gerratana (ed), Turin: Einaudi, 1975.

9. The ‘“graphological”’ approach takes into account not only the development of the author's thought, but also the compositional rules used by the author to write, rewrite and modify his thoughts across time. This method is at the core of the collaborative work Francioni is supervising. See the ‘“Nota al testo”’ in Antonio Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere: 1. Quaderni di traduzioni (1929–1932), vol 2, Rome: Treccani, 2007, pp 835–848.

10. Gianni Francioni, Officina Gramsciana. Ipotesi sulla struttura dei ‘“Quaderni del carcere”’, Naples: Bibliopolis, 1984.

11. See Q10, §44, p 1330. Translation is mine. I am glad to see Spivak embracing the idea that Gramsci changed his ideas on national language and dialect in his Notebook 29, about which I recall a nice conversation with her at the School of Criticism and Theory at Cornell University in 2007.

12. For Gramsci, language, and linguistics, the bibliography is vast and might include: Derek Boothman, Traducibilità e processi traduttivi. Un caso: A. Gramsci linguista, Perugia: Guerra, 2004; Craig Brandist, ‘Gramsci, Bakhtin, and the Semiotics of Hegemony’, New Left Review 216 (March–April), 1996, pp 94–109; Alessandro Carlucci, ‘“Molteplicità culturale e processi di unificazione”: dialetto, monolinguismo e plurilinguismo nella biografia e negli scritti di Antonio Gramsci’, Rivista italiana di dialettologia 29, 2005, pp 59–110; Antonio Carrannante, ‘Antonio Gramsci e i problemi della lingua italiana’, Belfagor 5, 1973, pp 544–556; Tullio De Mauro, ‘Alcuni appunti su Gramsci linguista’, in Valerio Calzolaio (ed), Gramsci e la modernità, Napoli: CUEN, 1991, pp 135–144; ‘Il linguaggio dalla natura alla storia. Ancora su Gramsci linguista’, in Giorgio Baratta and Guido Liguori (eds), Gramsci da un secolo all'altro, Roma: Editori Riuniti, 1999, pp 68–79; Stefano Gensini, ‘Linguistica e questione della lingua’, Critica Marxista 1, 1980, pp 152–164; Niels Helsloot, ‘Linguists of All Countries … ! On Gramsci's Premise of Coherence’, Journal of Pragmatics 4, 1989, pp 547–566; Renate Holub, Antonio Gramsci: Beyond Marxism and Postmodernism, London: Routledge, 1992; Peter Ives, Gramsci's Politics of Language: Engaging the Bakhtin Circle and the Frankfurt School, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004, and Language and Hegemony in Gramsci, London: Pluto, 2004; Peter Ives and Rocco Lacorte (eds), Gramsci, Language and Translation, Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2010; Franco Lo Piparo, Lingua, intellettuali, egemonia in Gramsci, Roma-Bari: Laterza, 1979; ‘Studio del linguaggio e teoria gramsciana’, Critica Marxista 2(3), 1987, pp 167–175; Luigi Rosiello, ‘Problemi e orientamenti linguistici negli scritti di A. Gramsci’, Quaderni dell'istituto di glottologia 2, 1957, pp 39–57; ‘Problemi linguistici negli scritti di Gramsci’, in Pietro Rossi (ed), Gramsci e la cultura contemporanea (Atti del convegno internazionale di studi gramsciani tenuto a Cagliari il 23–27 aprile 1967), vol 2, Roma: Editori Riuniti–Istituto Gramsci, 1970, pp 347–367; ‘La componente linguistica dello storicismo gramsciano’, in Alberto Caracciolo and Gianni Scalia (eds), La città futura: saggi sulla figura e il pensiero di Antonio Gramsci, Milano: Feltrinelli, 1959, pp 299–327; ‘Linguistica e marxismo nel pensiero di Antonio Gramsci’, Historiographia Linguistica 3, 1982, pp 431–452, republished in Paolo Ramat, Hans J Niederehe and Konrad Koerner (eds), The History of Linguistics in Italy, Amsterdam: Benjamins, 1986, pp 237–258; Leonardo Salamini, ‘Gramsci and Marxist Sociology of Language’, International Journal of the Sociology of Language 32, 1981, pp 27–44; Selenu, Ideas; Stefano Selenu, ‘Grammatica, logica e storia in Antonio Gramsci’, in Mauro Pala (ed), Americanismi: sulla ricezione del pensiero di Gramsci in America, Cagliari: CUEC, 2009, pp 195–212; Selenu, ‘Ives and Gramsci in Dialogue’; Selenu, ‘Elaborando le tracce della storia’.

13. Edward Said, Representations of the Intellectual: The 1993 Reith Lectures, London: Vintage, 1994; Brennan, ‘Antonio Gramsci and Postcolonial Theory’, pp 174–175; Timothy Brennan, Wars of Position: The Cultural Politics of Left and Right, New York: Columbia University Press, 2006, pp 267–268.

14. Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (eds and trans), New York: International Publishers, 1971, p 12, my emphasis.

15. Q12, §1, 1515. Here I cite from the Selections from the Prison Notebooks, Hoare and Nowell Smith (eds and trans), p 8.

16. Q12, §1, p 1515. Translation is mine.

17. Q12, §1, p 1524. Translation is mine.

18. Selections from the Prison Notebooks, p 14, my emphasis.

19. In this respect, Matteo Bartoli's teachings in linguistics and philology are paramount to keep in mind, as I argued elsewhere. See my own Ideas.

20. Antonio Gramsci, Letters from Prison, Frank Rosengarten (ed) and Ray Rosenthal (trans), New York: Columbia University Press, 1994, vol 1, p 83.