Who owns Gramsci? Response to Timothy Brennan

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Notes

1. His seemingly innocent formulation in the review, ‘let us call it “materialist”’, is misleading since Brennan and others have by now used this formulation repeatedly to define their own ideological position within the field (see Neil Lazarus, The Postcolonial Unconscious, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011, pp 12–20; and Benita Parry, ‘What's Left in Postcolonial Studies?’, http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/english/events/edwardsaid).

2. See Neelam Srivastava and Baidik Bhattacharya, ‘Introduction’, in N Srivastava and B Bhattacharya (eds), The Postcolonial Gramsci, New York: Routledge, 2012, p 2.

3. Timothy Brennan, Wars of Position: The Cultural Politics of Left and Right, New York: Columbia University Press, 2006, p 243.

4. See p 1 of the Introduction to the volume.

5. Sandro Mezzadra, La condizione postcoloniale: storia e politica del presente globale, Verona: Ombre Corte, 2008; see pp 8–9 especially for a discussion of the connections between Italian workerism and postcolonialism.

6. See Timothy Brennan, ‘Literary Criticism and the Southern Question’, Cultural Critique 11(Winter), 1988–1989, pp 87–114.

7. Srivastava and Bhattacharya, ‘Introduction’, p 2.

8. On p 88 of his essay ‘Literary Criticism and the Southern Question’, he mentions that there are only two Anglophone authors, Kiernan and Tom Nairn, who appreciated ‘Gramsci's awareness of the third world and colonialism’.

9. Brennan, Wars of Position, p 235.

10. While Brennan has denied his uniqueness, he has however acknowledged that Gramsci's work ‘is not typical of his Marxist contemporaries and that it represents a break in their thinking’ (Wars of Position, p 253).

11. Brennan, Wars of Position, p 248. Subsequent references to this work are given in the text in parentheses.

12. Since Brennan is concerned with belatedness, it may not be entirely out of place to point out that in proposing this idea he is repeating a well-established line that includes others like Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, London: Verso, 1994, and Arif Dirlik, ‘The Postcolonial Aura: Third World Criticism in the Age of Global Capitalism’, Critical Inquiry 20(2), 1994, pp 328–356.

13. Timothy Brennan, ‘Rushdie, Islam, and Postcolonial Criticism’, Social Text 31/32, 1992, p 276. Mufti retorted that Brennan's accusation of diasporic dilution reproduced ethnographic forms of knowledge where the (Western) critic is invisible and ‘the advertised site of cultural authenticity is the “native” who remains uncontaminated by “the West”’ (Aamir Mufti, ‘The Satanic Verses and the Cultural Politics of “Islam”: A Response to Brennan’, Social Text 31/32, 1992, p 281).

14. Edward Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic, London: Faber, 1984, p 16.

15. Srivastava and Bhattacharya, ‘Introduction’, p 2 (emphasis added).

16. Ranajit Guha, ‘Gramsci in India’, Journal of Modern Italian Studies 16(2), 2011, p 289. The Naxalites are an armed guerrilla movement, originally from West Bengal, which gained massive support across India in the 1960s and 1970s, also among Indian leftists. They claimed to represent the most oppressed sectors of the Indian population (i.e. tribal groups and landless labourers). They took their initial ideological inspiration from the writings of Mao. They are still very active today, as is described in Arundhati Roy's article, ‘Walking with the Comrades’: http://kasamaproject.org/2010/03/21/walking-with-the-comrades/

17. Brennan, Wars of Position, p 242.

18. Guha, ‘Gramsci in India’, p 290.

19. Brennan disingenuously omits a crucial part of Gramsci's passage about ‘Negro intellectuals’ which forms the basis of Srivastava's argument here. Gramsci lays out not one, but two hypotheses (Quaderni del carcere, Valentino Gerratana (ed), Turin: Einaudi, 1975, pp 1527–1528): one possibility is that ‘Negro intellectuals’ are enlisted by US hegemony; but the second one is that the most independent and energetic elements return to Africa in order to avoid the already humiliating (racist) legislation they are subject to in the US. Liberia can become an African Piedmont, which, as far as Srivastava understands Gramsci's interpretation of the Risorgimento, is seen as a dialectical step forward in the emancipation of the African people, much along the lines of Piedmont placing itself at the head of the incipient Italian nationalist movement for unification. She disagrees then with Brennan that this passage is a merely pessimistic reading of pan-Africanism; on the contrary, in the spirit of speculative enquiry, Gramsci examines the different possibilities offered by the interesting phenomenon of black intellectuals educated in metropolitan centres such as the US.

20. Quaderni del carcere, pp 1513–1551.

21. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, New York: Grove Press, 1968, p 40.