Abstract
The Gramscian category of ‘subaltern’ has only become one of the most prominent and used Gramscian concepts in the last 20 years or so. In Italy, at the end of the 1940s and the beginning of the 1950s there had however already been a significant precedent in its usage — albeit a limited one — in the polemical debate on the subject of the ‘popular subaltern world’ that appeared in the pages of the journal Società between Ernesto Martino (a great Italian anthropologist close to the Left but culturally formed in the school of Benedetto Croce) and Cesare Luporini (perhaps the most important philosopher and Marxist among PCI militants in this period).1 The dispute was at least in part concerned with the role to be assigned to the working class — as the ‘true’ revolutionary class — in the field of this ‘popular subaltern world.’
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Notes
Compare the interventions of these two intellectuals and the debate which follows in Carla Pasquinelli, ed., Antropologia culturale e questione meridionale (Firenze: La Nuova Italia, 1977).
The literature on Gramsci and ‘the subaltern’ is already immense. Here I must limit myself to indicating the literature which I have found most useful: Ranajit Guha and Gayatri C. Spivak, eds., Selected Subaltern Studies (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988);
Joseph A. Buttigieg, ‘Sulla categoria gramsciana di “subalterno,”’ in Gramsci da un secolo all’altro, ed. Giorgio Baratta and Guido Liguori (Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1999), 27–38;
Marcus E. Green, ‘Gramsci Cannot Speak: Presentations and Interpretations of Gramsci’s Concept of the Subaltern,’ in Rethinking Marxism 14 (2002), 1–24;
Joseph A. Buttigieg, ‘Subalterno, subalterni,’ in Dizionario gramsciano 1926–1937, ed. Guido Liguori and Pasquale Voza (Rome: Carocci, 2009);
Massimo Modonesi, Subalternidad, antagonismo, autonomia. Marxismo y subjetivacion politicia (Buenos Aires: Clacso, 2010).
Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. and trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1971).
This theoretico-political hypothesis had great influence in the passage from Marxism to post-Marxism, especially in the United States (see Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics [London: Verso, 1985]).
See Gayatri C. Spivak, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ in Marxism and Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 271–313.
See, Valentino Gerratana, ‘Prefazione,’ in Antonio Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, Vol. I, ed. Valentino Gerratana (Turin: Einaudi, 1975), xi–xlii.
See, Gianni Francioni, L’officina gramsciana. Ipotesi sulla struttura dei ‘Quaderni del carcere’ (Naples: Bibliopolis, 1984).
Antonio Gramsci, ‘Quaderno 25 (1934–1935),’ in Antonio Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere. Edizione anastatica dei manoscritti, Vol. 18, ed. Gianni Francioni (Rome–Cagliari: Biblioteca Treccani–L’Unione sarda, 2009), 221–37.
Antonio Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, Vol. I, ed. Valentino Gerratana, (Turin: Einaudi, 1975)
Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, Vol. II, ed. and trans. Joseph A. Buttigieg (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996)
Antonio Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, Vol. III, (Turin: Einaudi, 1975 ), Q25, §2, 2283–4.
Antonio Gramsci, Further Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. and trans. Derek Boothman (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1995), 51–2
See Guido Liguori, Sentieri gramsciani (Rome: Carocci, 2006), especially chapter 5 ‘Senso commune e buon senso,’ 69–88.
For a consideration of the proximity of some notes in the Prison Notebooks to Lenin’s thematic in What is to be Done? — albeit one which indicates not only the unity but also the discontinuity with Lenin’s theory — see Guido Liguori, ‘Movimenti sociali e ruoli del partito nel pensiero di Gramsci e oggi,’ Critica marxista 2 (2011), 59–68.
Antonio Gramsci, ‘What is to be Done?’ in Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Political Writings 1921–1926, ed. and trans. Quintin Hoare (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1978), 170.
Antonio Gramsci, Letters from Prison, ed. and trans. Lynne Lawner (London: Jonathan Cape, 1975), 258.
See Lea Durante, ‘Gramsci e la soggettività politica delle donne tra natura e storia,’ Critica marxista 1 (2012), 57–66.
Eric Hobsbawm, How to Change the World: Marx and Marxism 1840–2011 (London: Little, Brown, 2011), 317.
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Liguori, G. (2015). Conceptions of Subalternity in Gramsci. In: McNally, M. (eds) Antonio Gramsci. Critical Explorations in Contemporary Political Thought. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137334183_7
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