Philological Method and Subaltern Pasts

Abstract

This essay argues that Antonio Gramsci should be considered a postcolonial thinker. This is not an exercise in presenting the “legacy” of a European Marxist’s thought in the Third World. The aim here, rather, is to determine how Gramscian thought can be read as anticolonial, and how he related empire to the hegemonic-subaltern dialectic that structured his political theories. I engage with Joseph Buttigieg’s well-known essay “Gramsci’s Method” in order to explore how the philological method adopted in the Prison Notebooks offers several important insights for postcolonial studies, and bears obvious connections to the work of the Subaltern Studies historians, especially in terms of how it is central to the retrieval of subaltern pasts. I further argue that Gramsci’s interest in the national-popular and in forms of progressive nationalism that were grounded in internationalist solidarity suggests strong connections with Third Worldist theories of liberation struggles, such as tricontinentalism and the work of Frantz Fanon. Applying Buttigieg’s way of reading of Gramsci’s anti-dogmatic philological method to Third Worldism allows us to see how it renovated Marxism’s revolutionary aims and emancipatory futures, and ultimately helped to decolonize Marxism.

Keywords:

• Antonio Gramsci
• Prison Notebooks
• Joseph Buttigieg
• subaltern
• postcolonial studies
• Subaltern Studies
• Third Worldism
• decolonization

Until quite recently, it was often implied, rather than stated explicitly, that Antonio Gramsci had a huge influence on the formation of postcolonial studies as a field. But in recent years, this influence has been analyzed extensively (see Brennan 2006; Chambers 2006; Srivastava and Bhattacharya 2012; Langley 2015). As is well known, the Indian Subaltern Studies editorial collective took its key intellectual inspiration from Gramsci, as did Stuart Hall and Edward Said.¹ Gramsci has come to be accepted as a postcolonial thinker on a par with Frantz Fanon, Edward Said, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, not least because of how his political terminology has become integral to the field. The terms “subaltern,” “hegemony,” and “passive revolution” have been so thoroughly incorporated within postcolonial scholars’ theoretical apparatuses that in many instances they have lost their original connection to Gramsci’s work.²

The argument for considering Gramsci a postcolonial thinker is not a reductive exercise in presenting the “legacy” of a major First World Marxist in the “Third World”; it is far from Partha’s Chatterjee’s “derivative discourse,” his argument about the spread of European political ideologies in Asia and Africa (1986). The aim here, rather, is to determine how Gramscian thought can be read as anticolonial, and how he related empire to the hegemonic-subaltern dialectic that structured his political theories. Indeed, he construed “the idea of the city/country relationship as a political hegemony – as a shorthand for all of these various forms of internal colonization (territorial, economic, discursive, and ecological)” (Langley 2015, 43).

These are some of the reasons Gramsci found a very receptive audience in a group of radical Indian historians who wrote critically about the defeat of the emancipatory promises of independence and the continuing hegemony of the elite classes within postcolonial India. They were very much influenced by the radical energies unleashed by the Naxalite movement in India, and the way it highlighted a “discontent about the political set-up in the new Indian republic to which power was transferred when the British finally quit in 1947” (Guha 2011, 289).

The Naxalite movement had started on 25 May 1967 in a village of Naxalbari in West Bengal, and was an armed movement that sought to end labor bondage and feudal practices that persisted in the Bengali countryside. It was from the start a heterogeneous group of militants: peasants, communist activists, and university students. They were inspired by Mao Zedong’s ideology of peasant revolt and resistance. The Naxalite movement quickly spread far beyond the village of Naxalbari and West Bengal, and has come to represent an Indian left movement agitating for revolutionary change and socio-economic redistribution of resources across the country. It was also very critical of the Indian state’s official communist parties, and in 2004 the movement founded a new party, the Communist Party of India (Maoist) (Shah and Jain 2017, 1166).

The historians’ editorial collective known as Subaltern Studies, which emerged in India in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and founded by Ranajit Guha, was thus primarily conceived as a political project, and not merely an academic one. As Guha recalls, Subaltern Studies, though Marxist in outlook, kept its distance from India’s official Communist Parties: “we considered ourselves as Marxists in our attempt to develop a radical critique of colonialism and colonialist knowledge in the study of South Asian history and society. We, therefore, opposed both the official communist parties for their opportunistic and dogmatic use of Marxism” (2011, 289).

Guha and his fellow Subaltern Studies historians were drawn to Gramsci precisely because he was an anti-dogmatic thinker. Joseph Buttigieg’s celebrated essay “Gramsci’s Method,” which this special issue of Italian Culture commemorates, offers a clear articulation of Gramsci’s conceptual flexibility in relationship to Marxism: “The theory and practice of philological criticism found in the notebooks constitute in themselves a most important contribution to the elaboration of an anti-dogmatic philosophy of praxis” (1990, 281). As I argue below, Buttigieg’s reading of the Gramscian method offers several important insights for postcolonial studies, and bears obvious connections to the work of the Subaltern Studies historians. It allows us to explore the multiple ways in which Gramsci can considered a postcolonial thinker.

Let us then focus first on Subaltern Studies as the main set of intellectual heirs of the Gramscian project within the postcolonial field. Guha’s use of hegemony and domination as key Gramscian concepts for analyzing British colonialism in India and peasant insurgencies is evident from his first, seminal book, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India (1983). At this point, it seems timely to pause for a bit to consider the conceptual terrain of the “subaltern” and the far-reaching influence the concept has had on the analysis of anticolonial struggles, past and present. The postcolonial afterlives of subalternity offer a direct link to Buttigieg’s essay, and to the philological approach that he felt was central to Gramsci’s thinking and to indications for future research.

Buttigieg illustrates Gramsci’s method by remarking on the many and unexpected ramifications that arise out of apparently anecdotal or obscure observations in the Notebooks. He demonstrates this by commenting on Gramsci’s analysis of Alberto Lumbroso’s characterization of the peasant leader Davide Lazzaretti as crazy and abnormal.⁴ This, for Gramsci, shows that elites tend to view subaltern groups either as pathological or barbaric, or both. Buttigieg comments: “One cannot help noticing how, once again, a remark occasioned by a very specific, concrete detail—i.e. Lombroso’s characterization of Lazzaretti as abnormal or insane—is the starting point for much broader considerations about cultural history, elitist discursive practices, the marginalization of subaltern groups. This movement from the particular to the general characterizes countless notes in the Quaderni.” (1990, 66, my emphasis).

What then emerges in Buttigieg’s reading, and of course in the Notebooks themselves, is that the “philological method” is central to the retrieval of subaltern pasts. A non-totalizing and non-systematic approach is necessary in order to let the subaltern’s consciousness “come to light,” in her own words and according to her own conception of the world. The Gramscian method would then yield specific kinds of historiographical texts for narrating the history of subaltern groups. Their history is necessarily fragmented and episodic, since their insurgencies are constantly dominated and quelled by the elite groups, and the traces of their “independent initiatives” are similarly fragmented and scattered. Given the material dispersal of their archive, the history of subaltern groups can “only be dealt with monographically, and each monograph requires an immense quantity of material which is often hard to collect” (Gramsci 1971, 55).

The Subaltern Studies historians took this indication of method very much to heart; their collective project, which spans many volumes, takes a monographical approach, rather than a meta-narrative one, to the history of anticolonial resistance in India. Guha, in his 2011 “Homage to a Teacher,” which traces his intellectual and political debt to Gramsci, if anything underplays the deep connections between the Italian thinker and his own research. The most striking link is indeed the respect for and interest in subaltern consciousness that Gramsci always had, going against the “positivist” and deterministic tendencies of much contemporary historiography, which tended to subsume the particularities of subaltern resistance within a modernizing narrative of movement toward political autonomy.

Gramsci, of course, remained a committed Marxist, and as thus held a secular attitude toward subaltern histories. However, his interest in folklore and peasant movements is characterized by an openness and generosity of thought toward the significance of these “traces” that distinguishes his approach from that of many scholarly contemporaries. When writing about Davide Lazzaretti, the popular religious leader, Gramsci mentions that his republican position was bizarrely “legato all’elemento religioso e profetico” (1975, 2280). Gramsci was deeply interested in the mindset of a man who was able to lead a popular rebellion among peasants just after Italian unification, and at a time when the left was in power in Italy. He spends some time examining the diverse cultural sources for Lazzaretti’s political beliefs; this is an example of method, and a demonstration of the respect Gramsci had for these eclectic principles, which were very far from rationalist, mainstream republicanism or socialism, and were marked by messianic/mystical pronouncements. And yet investigating these contradictory traces was the only way to try to retrieve a version of the past that belonged to the subaltern subject, and not to elite groups—whether on the right or on the left—who dismissed this perspective as outmoded, primitive, barbaric, or even “pathological.”

Gramsci’s method offers excellent resources for the postcolonial scholar to construct “an account of the history of repression” (Buttigieg 1990, 65). Guha’s well-known essay “The Prose of Counter-Insurgency” resonates deeply with the Gramscian spirit. This essay is a tour-de-force, offering an against-the-grain granular reading of British documents regarding various Indian rebellions against the colonial authorities, such as the 1855 Santal rebellion, which took place in Bengal, and the 1857 Indian Mutiny. It is indeed among the most impressive demonstrations of the Subaltern Studies method, which has much in common with Gramscian philology, as it consists in a detailed discourse analysis of the documents and of counterinsurgency more broadly. Guha, toward the end of the piece, shows up not only the fallacies of the colonial account, but also those of the radical and Marxist historiography that has attempted to make sense of these rebellions. He highlights a reluctance to come to terms with the “religious element in rebel consciousness,” and a tendency to assimilate peasant rebellions “to the career of the Raj, the Nation, or the People” rather than investigate the specific consciousness of the subaltern. “It follows, in each case, from a refusal to acknowledge the insurgent as the subject of his own history” (Guha 1988, 82). This refusal is discernible in the work of left historians as much as in nationalist or colonialist ones.

Later, other Subaltern Studies historians like Dipesh Chakrabarty would develop Guha’s insights even further, by arguing that religious and non-secular worldviews form part of a “modern” political consciousness (Chakrabarty 2000, 12–14), rejecting the notion that such worldviews were pre-modern or antimodern: “This peasant-but-modern political sphere was not bereft of the agency of gods, spirits, and other supernatural beings” (2000, 13). Chakrabarty builds on Guha’s insights by making a distinction between subaltern histories, where the historian makes the subaltern the object of a historicized inquiry (albeit a sympathetic and respectful one), and subaltern pasts, in which the actual point of view of the subaltern is given epistemological validity. Returning to the figure of the Santal rebel analyzed by Guha, he remarks on the contemporary historian’s dual relationship with the subaltern: “First, we can situate ourselves as a modern subject for whom the Santal’s lifeworld is an object of historical enquiry and explanation. But we can also look on the Santal as someone illuminating possibilities for our own lifeworlds” (2000, 112). The sense of purpose, causation, and political motivations of the Santal rebel are not immediately translatable into a rational and secular worldview that can act as a meta-historical “gloss” on their actions. Admittedly, this is quite a leap from Gramsci’s method, but it shares the anti-positivist approach that Buttigieg remarks on in his essay. Gramsci remained a historicist, but he also valued subaltern experience and culture, and advocated for a return to popular culture on the part of Italian intellectuals, whose deracinated and “cosmopolitan” outlook he decried. In this sense, Gramsci shares some similarities with the thought of Third Worldist intellectuals who advocated the importance of culture in anticolonial revolution: namely Frantz Fanon, Amílcar Cabral, and Ernesto “Che” Guevara.

Moreover, Guha and Chakrabarty’s insistence on subaltern singularity aligns with Gramsci’s reformulation of hegemony as agency against deterministic understandings of history. Buttigieg notes that Gramsci felt that positivist sociology, the insistence on explaining away historical contradictions and inconsistencies, was “incompatible with the political program of Marxism” (1990, 74); and he adds that “deterministic philosophy is a recipe for passivity” (1990, 74). Gramsci developed Lenin’s notion of hegemony in political struggle, emphasizing the role of human agency. Hegemony as agency and as cultural leadership were to be the most important understandings of the term for anticolonial struggles. Culture becomes a means of connection to the people, as well as to the political party (often in exile) that champions anti-colonial nationalism.

In the Gramscian spirit, the focus on culture cannot be divorced from the emphasis on political engagement. Fanon’s “black Marxism” in The Wretched of the Earth, by incorporating a materialist focus on culture as part of its anti-colonial project, was one of the most exciting developments in Marxism in the postwar years. The great innovation of 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 2000, 275).

If establishing hegemony meant affirming the agency of the political subject over the forces of history, then we can see how theorists of Third Worldism, such as Cabral and Fanon, pinpointed the necessary nexus between hegemony, political leadership, and an organic connection with the culture of the colonized. Cabral took exception to Marxism for its doctrinal inflexibility in analyzing Third World struggles. 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 within their own history (Cabral 1973, 77ff).

Gramsci’s anti-dogmatic Marxism, mediated through his philological method, led the way to the “decolonization of the European Marxist tradition,” which, as Robert Young has discussed, can be said to have been key to Third World Marxist liberation movements, and “a project which has remained central to postcolonial theory” (2001, 167). Gramsci gained an enthusiastic readership across the postcolonial world, especially in South America and India.³ Gramsci’s ideas of Marxist revolution were influenced by anticolonial movements taking place around the world in the 1920s and 1930s, and he frequently spoke out against imperialist oppression in his pre-prison writings published in the newspaper Avanti (Langley 2015, 56). Moreover, the fragmented and “unfinished” nature of the Quaderni invites multiple interpretations and pathways within his Marxist thought.

This perspective on Gramsci provided the basis for the Postcolonial Gramsci project that I undertook with Baidik Bhattacharya, which collected a series of essays on Gramsci in specific postcolonial contexts. As we explain in our introduction to the volume, while the essays demonstrate a sustained attention to the philological detail of Gramsci’s texts, often drawing on the Italian original and the English translations, they also reiterate the importance of a non-dogmatic approach in the interpretation of his work, insisting that there is no single “reading” of his oeuvre (Srivastava and Bhattacharya 2011, 2). The validity and productiveness of postcolonial interpretations of Gramsci is evident from these essays, despite objections from critics like Timothy Brennan, whose understanding of the philological method tended to equate it with a faithfulness to the letter of the text that borders on dogmatism in its dismissal of alternative interpretations of the thinker.

Gramsci’s influence on Marxist liberation movements and Third Worldism can be traced back to Lenin, who understood the importance that colonial revolutions could have for the new communist state in Russia, and who had written on imperialism as the highest stage of capitalism (Lenin 1977). In imagining the alliance between the Western proletariat and colonized populations, Lenin offered a form of doctrinal flexibility, “in which Marxist political ideas were responsive to the specificity of the particular culture into which they were introduced” (Young 2001, 139). This ideological flexibility resurfaces powerfully in the Notebooks, and would later flower in anticolonial movements inspired by, but also building upon, socialism and Marxism, across the tricontinental region (Latin America, Asia, and Africa).

In order to further understand how and why it is possible to make the connection between Gramsci and Third Worldism, let us turn to the noted Egyptian sociologist Anouar Abdel-Malek, a key figure in theoretical debates on Third Worldism in the 1970s. His book La dialectique sociale, published in 1970, offers the first sustained examination of the relationship between Marxism and anticolonial liberation movements, and it is dedicated to Gramsci. Indeed, in many ways Abdel-Malek’s acute critique of Eurocentrism in this book predates the central tenets of postcolonial theory as developed after the publication of Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978). Abdel-Malek critiques how Third-World revolutions are dismissed by European Marxists, who see them as mainly derivative, when in fact they are developing and renewing Marxism as a philosophy of praxis applicable to diverse cultural contexts. He traces an alternative genealogy of Marxist thought, which he understands as both vision of the world and as an analytical method for approaching the dialectic of the real world (so both idealistic and pragmatic), going from Gramsci to Mao Zedong. This positioning of Gramsci within the intellectual trajectory of non-European Marxism offers a new perspective on his oeuvre and opens a multiplicity of new readings and applications. Abdel-Malek retrieves Gramscian thought for Third World revolutions, situating him within a dynamic tradition whose relationship to Marxism is defined as “part of that line, not the repetition of the dogma or the letter, nor as exegesis” (1974, 56). Here we are reminded once again of Buttigieg’s illuminating exploration of Gramsci’s anti-dogmatic philological method.

Let us investigate a bit further why Abdel-Malek was so drawn to Gramsci. Abdel-Malek critiques the idea of civilization as ethnocentric and decries the lack of Marxist approaches to the study of other cultures. However, he makes an exception for Gramsci: “indirectly, through Italian cultural dualism, European Marxism glimpses the problem of the dialectic between civilizations, and how the industrialized and cultured North [of Italy] could not be reduced to the South that evoked the human landscape of the non-European Mediterranean” (1974, 182). Abdel-Malek connects Gramsci’s conceptual and political space of the “Mezzogiorno” to areas beyond the West. He thus situates the beginnings of inter-cultural interpretations of Marxism in Gramsci’s elaboration of the Southern Question, and his theorization of the Italian South as a “semi-colonial market” for the North. He would further develop the notion of internal colonialism in relationship to Northern hegemony over the Southern subaltern, and in relationship, of course, to Fascism.

Gramsci argues that after unification in 1861 there was a situation of “internal colonialism” in Italy, with the North exercising political and economic hegemony over the South. The racialist discourse that the North projected onto the South of Italy recalled colonial racism. Gramsci links Northern racism toward the South to the increasing exploitation of Southern material resources on the part of the North, after unification. “La ‘miseria’ del Mezzogiorno era ‘inspiegabile’ storicamente per le masse popolari del Nord; esse non capivano che l’unità non era avvenuta su una base di uguaglianza, ma come egemonia del Nord sul Mezzogiorno nel rapporto territoriale di città-campagna, cioè che il Nord concretamente era una ‘piovra’ che si arricchiva alle spese del Sud” (1975, 2021). The common resident 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 (1975, 2022).

Italy’s unification in 1861 and its defeat of Fascism in 1945 had been preceded by protracted conflicts that were read by anticolonial activists as wars of liberation. They appeared as key moments that connected Italian history to decolonization struggles such as the Indian nationalist movement and the Algerian Revolution. Gramsci, who of course did not live to see the end of Fascism, believed Italy to be akin to an occupied territory and the anti-fascist struggle to be a “war of position,” a term that he used in reference to Gandhi’s method of passive resistance to British colonial rule (1975, 122); his own imprisonment by Mussolini’s regime helped to uphold this conviction.

In my view, Gramsci’s understanding of anti-fascism as a war of liberation and a fight for communist revolution yields insights into the applicability of his thought to anticolonial struggles. Young has remarked on the problems posed to European Marxist intellectuals by nationalism, which was seen as antithetical to communist internationalism (2001, 171). However, Third World revolutionaries did not see any contradiction between their own political struggles and the wider struggle against imperialism and capitalism. Far from viewing nationalism as a deviation from Marxism, “tricontinental Marxism has emphasized what one might call the untranslatability of revolutionary practices, the need for attention to local forms, and the translation of the universal into the idiom of the local” (Young 2001, 169). Gramsci also appreciated the importance of the local in liberation struggles. He understood subalterns as a composite group that spanned both the industrial workers of the North and the peasants of the South. To achieve revolution in Italy, Gramsci argued, organic intellectuals needed to “go to the people” and attempt to develop a national-popular culture as the basis for a viable revolutionary strategy. Like Third Worldists, Gramsci did not see nationalism as a necessary rejection of internationalism.

Fanon’s thought, as mentioned above, offers clear analogies to that of Gramsci in his revalorization of native culture within liberation struggles. Fanon emphasizes inventiveness, not a return to tradition, as constitutive of a truly decolonized national culture (2004, 179). The colonized intellectual fighting for his people must immerse himself in this native culture in order to fight his Europeanized identity (in Fanon, the intellectual is always male). In Fanon’s celebrated essay “On National Culture,” he 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 in Italy is rendered as the intellectual’s “returning to his people” (2004, 160).

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 produce national culture. On the contrary, Fanon stresses how the revolution transforms 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 culture: “a dense, subterranean life in perpetual renewal” (Fanon 2004, 160).

At this point, it is important to be mindful of the difference between nationalism and national liberation; these are not one and the same thing, and it is important to distinguish between progressive and non-progressive nationalisms (Young 2001, 172). Gramsci, writing in the Notebooks in 1932, had already grasped this difference, possibly because he had been reflecting on Italy’s unification as a failed revolution and on Fascism as the inward deterioration of the Risorgimento’s emancipatory promises.

At an ideological level, Italian communist and socialist thought stemmed from a sense that Fascism had radically distorted the values of the Risorgimento. Or rather, the progressive wing of Italian nationalism during the Risorgimento had been suppressed and betrayed by the politically conservative faction during Italy’s various wars of independence, led by the Savoy dynasty in Piedmont. This caused Gramsci to define the Risorgimento as a “conquista regia” in the Notebooks (1975, 2031–2032). This conservative faction exercised its hegemony over Italian governments from unification onwards, and then even more brutally with the advent of Fascism in 1922.

Across the Notebooks, Gramsci’s engagement with the varying facets of nationalism in Italy was partly to do with his sense that it was an unfinished project. In a paragraph entitled Risorgimento dating from 1932 (subsequently reprised in Notebook 19 in 1934–35), he reflects on the differing political directions that nationalism could take. He was imagining alternative, possibly utopian futures for an Italy he would never see, at a time when Mussolini was attempting to expand Italy’s empire overseas by preparing to invade Ethiopia:

§ 127. Risorgimento. Il moto nazionale che condusse all’unificazione dello Stato italiano deve necessariamente sboccare nel nazionalismo e nell’imperialismo nazionalistico e militare? Questo sbocco è anacronistico e antistorico; esso è realmente contro tutte le tradizioni italiane, romane prima, cattoliche poi. Le tradizioni sono cosmopolitiche. … [L]e condizioni di una espansione italiana nel presente e per l’avvenire non esistono e non appare che siano in processo di formazione. … Il popolo italiano è quello che “nazionalmente” è più interessato all’internazionalismo. Non solo l’operaio ma il contadino e specialmente il contadino meridionale. … Il nazionalismo è una escrescenza anacronistica nella storia italiana, di gente che ha la testa volta all’indietro come i dannati di Dante. La missione di civiltà del popolo italiano è nella ripresa del cosmopolitismo romano e medioevale, ma nella sua forma più moderna e avanzata. Sia pure nazione proletaria; proletaria come nazione perché è stata l’esercito di riserva di capitalismi stranieri, perché ha dato maestranze a tutto il mondo, insieme coi popoli slavi. Appunto perciò deve innestarsi nel fronte moderno di lotta per riorganizzare il mondo anche non italiano, che ha contribuito a creare con il suo lavoro. (1975, 1190)

There are many thought-provoking elements in Gramsci’s passage. In many ways, the passage is a gloss on the poet Giovanni Pascoli’s poetic and rhetorical apologia for Italian colonialism, “La grande proletaria s’è mossa.” Pascoli’s 1911 speech, written during Italy’s invasion of Libya, was a moral and political justification of the invasion from a socialist outlook; he characterizes Italy as a “great proletarian nation,” in need of its place in the sun, thus prefiguring Mussolini’s imperialist rhetoric. By contrast, Gramsci critiques imperialist expansion and the hyper-nationalism that characterizes fascism, as well as presenting an awareness that Italy has not reached the stage of material development necessary to successfully realize such an imperialism—but what I want to highlight here is his clear idea of the Italian nation as inherently internationalist.

Against “imperial cosmopolitanism,” which he so roundly denounces in his history of intellectuals in the Notebooks, Gramsci posits a proletarian internationalism as a way of Italy’s being in the world and being open to the world. He takes the language of Mussolini’s imperialist rhetoric that constructed Italy as an “empire of labor” and a “proletarian nation,” and through a form of Marxist irony, succeeds in investing it with a revolutionary potential. Propaganda for the Italian empire in Africa emphasized the manual labor of Italians on African soil as forming the backbone of Mussolini’s colonial enterprise, versus British and French “absentee imperialism.” Gramsci sketches out an alternative to nationalist expansion through the idea of an Italian internationalism: a cosmopolitanism based on solidarity with the global working classes, through the shared experience of living by one’s labor.

What stands out in this passage is the diasporic dimension that Gramsci recognizes in Italy’s “labor-force for export,” as if he had realized that Italians abroad were much more in the category of diasporic migrants than in that of colonizers. Nothing illustrates this point more than the semantic ambiguity of the term colonia, or colony, in Italian usage at the end of the nineteenth century, just a few years after Italy had founded its first colonies (Eritrea and Somalia): it meant both Italian immigrant communities abroad, for instance in Buenos Aires and New York City, and Italian colonial possessions in East Africa.

It may seem, at first, that Gramsci is ferociously anti-nationalist in this passage, denouncing nationalism as an “anachronistic growth.” However, what he is really critiquing is a certain retrograde version of nationalism that has imperialism as its endpoint. On the other hand, as we can read in the passage, the internationalist dimension that is an essential part of a “progressive” nationalism can be said to characterize Gramsci’s idea of national identity, an anti-Fascist and truly revolutionary understanding of the nation.

This essay has attempted to explore the links between Gramsci’s philological method and the retrieval of subaltern pasts, which has been at the heart of decolonization projects in a variety of disciplines. These links become easier to make if we pay greater attention to Gramsci’s anticolonial spirit, and to his acute perception that colonialism often begins at home; he immediately understood the Southern Question, namely the hegemonic relationship of the Italian North over the South, as a home-grown variant of the colonial question, which was a pressing one for Marxists in the interwar period.

In his thinking on these questions, Gramsci shares some traits with certain anti-colonialists whose intellectual formation and beliefs came from Marxism, but who had developed a particular interest and investment in the colonial question that would lead them to engage critically with the Communist International’s claim that Communism was the only possible political horizon for colonial emancipation. Such figures included the Trinidadian anti-imperial activist George Padmore, who would later write a book entitled Pan-Africanism or Communism (1956), presenting the conceptual differences between African socialism and European varieties of Marxism as an either-or choice to the committed Black militant. As Fanon would write in 1961, almost thirty years after Gramsci’s death, “a Marxist analysis should always be slightly stretched every time we have to do with the colonial problem” (2004, 32). This is not a question of disavowing Marxism, but rather of attempting to decolonize it. Gramsci, of course, never distanced himself from the Communist International; but his reflections on imperialism lay bare the inherent colonialist tendencies within nationalism, whether on the right or on the left. What the Sardinian thinker, who grew up in a semi-colonial periphery himself, teaches us is that anti-colonialism is not only a process of resistance located in the colonies or the peripheries of the world; it can and must develop as a practice of constant critique internal to Europe itself. The method of this critique, as I have attempted to show in this essay, has its roots in the Gramscian philology outlined by Buttigieg, and it is essential to the retrieval of subaltern and colonized pasts.

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Notes on contributors

Neelam Srivastava

Neelam Srivastava is Professor of Postcolonial and World Literature at Newcastle University, UK. She is the author of Italian Colonialism and Resistances to Empire, 1930–1970 (2018) and the co-editor of The Postcolonial Gramsci (2012). She is the co-founder of the Postcolonial Print Cultures Network, and has published widely on postcolonial Indian literature (including her 2008 monograph, Secularism in the Postcolonial Indian Novel), postcolonial theories, and Italian colonial and postcolonial cultures.

Notes

1 See Ranajit Guha (2011) and Neelam Srivastava and Baidik Bhattacharya (2012), in particular pages 7–11.

2 These are all terms discussed at various points in Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks. They were then taken up by postcolonial theorists and historians. Specifically, Partha Chatterjee (1986) discusses the Indian nationalist movement as an example of “passive revolution,” namely the gradual emancipation of Indian society through bourgeois hegemony rather than through revolution. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s famous essay “Can the Subaltern Speak? Scattered Speculations on Widow Sacrifice” (1988) re-works Gramsci’s subaltern for the Indian feminist context, transforming its meaning in the process. Hegemony is a term widely used in political and cultural theory to indicate the political, cultural, and economic dominance of one social group over another.

3 See Walter D. Mignolo, “Mariátegui and Gramsci in ‘Latin’ America: Between Revolution and Decoloniality”; and Rajeswari Sunder Rajan, “Questioning Intellectuals: Reading Caste with Gramsci in Two Indian Literary Texts”, both in Srivastava and Bhattacharya (2012), 165–217.

4 David Forgacs has established that this is actually a reference to the historian Alberto Lumbroso, rather than the criminologist Cesare Lombroso, as was previously believed (see Forgacs’s article in this issue).