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Notes

1. Examples include: Shaobo Xie, ‘Rethinking the Postcolonial and the Global: An Introduction’, Ariel 41(1), 2009, pp 7–11. Recent issues of boundary 2 include ‘Snapshots of Intellectual Life in Contemporary Post-Revolutionary China’, 35(2), 2008; and ‘The Pathology of Empire’, 35(1), 2008, on the status of the spectacular aspects of empire in the post-9/11 era of Abu Ghraib; for its part Social Text 26(2 95), 2008, includes essays on ‘Emergency Democracy, Global Garment Workers in Sri Lanka’, ‘Urban Modernity on the Periphery: A New Middle Class Reinvents the Palestinian City’; Transition 99, 2008, ‘Avenging History in the Former French Colonies’; and Public Culture 21(1), 2009, ‘Untimely Vision: Aime Césaire, Decolonization, and Utopia’ and ‘The Terrorist Imaginary’.

2. This counter-factual reading of postcolonial studies as always already rooted in historical conflict and immediate political struggle can be found, for example, in Graham Huggan, ‘Postcolonialism and Revolution’, introduction to The Oxford Handbook of Postcolonial Studies, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013, pp 1–49.

3. ‘Antonio Gramsci and Post-Colonial Theory: “Southernism”’, Diaspora 10(2), 2001, pp 143–187.

4. Mauro Pala (ed), Americanismi sulla ricezione del pensiero di Gramsci negli Stati Uniti (On the reception of Gramsci's thought in the United States), Sardegna: CUEC, 2010; Stefano Selenu, Alcuni aspetti della questione della lingua sarda attraverso la diade sotria-grammatic un'impostione di tipo gramsciano, in Antologia Premia Gramsci IX, Sassari: Editrice Democratica Sarda, 2005, pp 223–258; Lea Durante, ‘Nazionale-popolare’, in Fabio Frosini and Guido Liguori (eds), Le parole di Gramsci, Roma: Carocci editore, 2004, pp 150–169; Emanuele Saccarelli, Gramsci and Trotsky in the Shadow of Stalinism, New York: Routledge, 2008; Aijaz Ahmad, ‘Fascism and National Culture: Reading Gramsci in the Days of Hindutva’, Social Scientist 21(3–4), 1993; Franco Lo Piparo, Lingua, intellettuali, egemonia in Gramsci, Bari: Laterza, 1979.

5. Preliminary studies of this decisive gap in knowledge of Gramsci's formative years when he made the acquaintance of communist intellectuals from throughout the world can be found in Giuseppe Vacca, Vita e pensieri di Antonio Gramsci. 1926–1937, Torino: Einaudi, 2012; and in the special issue of Studi Storici 4, 2001.

6. A Gramsci, Epistolario, vol I: gennaio 1906–dicembre 1922, David Bidussa, Francesco Giasi, Maria Luisa Righi and Gadi Luzzatto Voghera (eds), Roma: Istituto Enciclopedia Italiana, 2009; and A Gramsci, Epistolario, vol II: gennaio–novembre 1923, David Bidussa, Francesco Giasi and Maria Luisa Righi (eds), Roma: Istituto Enciclopedia Italiana, 2011.

7. See the following: Timothy Brennan, ‘Literary Criticism and the Southern Question’, Cultural Critique, 1988–1989, pp 87–114, which explores the connections between Mariátegui and Gramsci, the uses to which both put the nineteenth-century literary historian Francesco de Sanctis, and the ‘national’ aspects of internationalism in the thinking of both figures, as well as the relevance of Gramsci's literary theories on Italian unification to debates in India. In addition to ‘Antonio Gramsci and Post-Colonial Theory: “Southernism”’, which I have already mentioned, see Brennan, ‘Antonio Gramsci negli Stati Uniti, un'esasperazione’, in Pala, Americanismi sulla ricezione del pensiero di Gramsci; ‘The Uses of Gramsci in Contemporary Theory’, in Martina Ghosh-Schellhorn (with Vera Alexander) (ed), Peripheral Centres, Central Peripheries: India and Its Diaspora(s), Munster: Literatur Verlag, 2006; ‘L'intelletuale meridionale’, in Silvia Albertazzi, Barnaba Maj and Roberto Vecchi (eds), Periferie della storia, Bologna: Quodlibet, 2004, pp 71–150; and ‘Cosmopolitanism and Internationalism’, New Left Review 7(Jan/Feb), 2001, pp 75–84.

8. Kevin Anderson, Marx at the Margins: On Nationalism, Ethnicity, and Non-Western Societies, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010; K M Pannikar, Asia and Western Dominance, London: Allen and Unwin, 1959; Ken Post, Revolution's Other World: Communism and the Periphery 1917–1939, London: Macmillan, 1997; Vladislava Reznik, ‘Succession or Subversion: Professional Strategies of Soviet Cultural Revolution. The Case of Nikolai Marr’, Slavonica 13(2), 2007; John Callaghan, ‘Colonies, Racism, the CPGB and the Comintern in the Inter-War Years’, Science and Society 61(4), 1997–1998, pp 513–525.

9. ‘Antonio Gramsci and Post-Colonial Theory: “Southernism”’, p 144.

10. Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith (eds and trans), New York: International Publishers, 1971, p 21. I am using this edition because it is the one Srivastava uses. All further references to this book will occur in the text of the essay.

11. ‘The Southern Intellectual’, Wars of Position: The Cultural Politics of Left and Right, New York: Columbia University Press, 2006, pp 264–272.

12. Antonio Gramsci, ‘Some Aspects of the Southern Question’, in Pre-Prison Writings, Richard Bellamy (ed), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994, pp 326, 330.

13. Gramsci's definition of common sense, however, does not stress the doctrinal unifying features of religious belief, its transcendence, or its vital counter-hegemonic properties. Quite the contrary: ‘The fundamental characteristic of common sense consists in its being a disjointed, incoherent and inconsequential conception of the world that matches the character of the multitudes whose philosophy it is’ (PN III 333).

14. Quoted in Domenico Losurdo, Heidegger and the Ideology of War: Community, Death and the West, Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 2001 [1991], p 101. This is an informative survey and diagnosis of interwar ‘reactionary modernism’ based on primary sources not readily available in English. Inasmuch as it depicts in great detail the domestic politics of theory in its relationship to colonial attitudes and to Eurocentrism, it is highly relevant to postcolonial studies.

15. Geoff Waite, ‘Heidegger, Schmitt, Strauss: The Hidden Monologue, or, Conserving Esotericism to Justify the High Hand of Violence’, in Peter Uwe Hohendahl (ed), Radical Conservative Thought in Transition: Martin Heidegger, Ernst Jünger, Carl Schmitt 1940–1960, special issue of Cultural Critique 69(Spring), 2008.