1st Edition
The Postcolonial Gramsci
The importance of Antonio Gramsci’s work for postcolonial studies can hardly be exaggerated, and in this volume, contributors situate Gramsci's work in the vast and complex oeuvre of postcolonial studies. Specifically, this book endeavors to reassess the impact on postcolonial studies of the central role assigned by Gramsci to culture and literature in the formation of a truly revolutionary idea of the national—a notion that has profoundly shaped the thinking of both Frantz Fanon and Edward Said. Gramsci, as Iain Chambers has argued, has been instrumental in helping scholars rethink their understanding of historical, political, and cultural struggle by substituting the relationship between tradition and modernity with that of subaltern versus hegemonic parts of the world. Combining theoretical reflections and re-interpretations of Gramsci, the scholars in this collection present comparative geo-cultural perspectives on the meaning of the subaltern, passive revolution, hegemony, and the concept of national-popular culture in order to chart out a political map of the postcolonial through the central focus on Gramsci.
Introduction: The Postcolonial Gramsci Neelam Srivastava and Baidik Bhattacharya I. Gramsci and Postcolonial Studies 1. Il Gramsci meridionale Robert JC Young 2. Provincializing the Italian Reading of Gramsci Paolo Capuzzo and Sandro Mezzadra 3. The Travels of the Organic Intellectual: The Black Colonized Intellectual in George Padmore and Frantz Fanon Neelam Srivastava 4. The Secular Alliance: Gramsci, Said and the Postcolonial Question Baidik Bhattacharya II. Gramsci and the Global Present 5. The ‘Unseen Order’: Religion, Secularism and Hegemony Iain Chambers 6. Gramsci in the Twenty-first Century Partha Chatterjee 7. Entering the World from an Oblique Angle: On Jia Zhangke as an Organic Intellectual Pheng Cheah 8. Questioning Intellectuals: Reading Caste with Gramsci in Two Indian Literary Texts Rajeswari Sunder Rajan 9. Mariátegui and Gramsci in ‘Latin’ América: Between Revolution and Decoloniality Walter D. Mignolo III. Epilogue Interview with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
Biography
Neelam Srivastava is Senior Lecturer in Postcolonial Literature at Newcastle University (UK). She is the author of Secularism in the Postcolonial Indian Novel: National and Cosmopolitan Narratives in English (Routledge, 2007). She has published essays on South Asian literature in English, the film-maker Gillo Pontecorvo, and the cultural history of Italian colonialism. She is currently the coordinator of an International Research Network, "Postcolonial Translation: The Case of South Asia", funded by the Leverhulme Trust.
Baidik Bhattacharya is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Delhi, India. His essays on colonial and postcolonial theory and literature have appeared in journals like Postcolonial Studies, Novel, and Interventions. He is currently completing a book manuscript tentatively titled Postcolonial Writing in the Era of Globalization.
"The collection of essays in The Postcolonial Gramsci set out to argue a new theoretical framework underpinned by a Gramscian point of view in dealing with postcolonial studies from the Marxist and post-Marxist points of view. The contributors to the book situate the cultural and political logic of Gramsci’s notions of liberation and ideology and of the role of intellectuals and the working of hegemonic political economy within postcolonial studies in order to reconceptualise the nature of class, power and the conditions of existence in colonial and modern societies in Africa, China and India." -- Shelley Walia, Frontline
