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Philological Method and Subaltern Pasts

Lookup NU author(s): Professor Neelam Srivastava

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-ND).


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 the ways in which 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 offers strong connections with Third-Worldist theories of liberation struggles, such as tricontinentalism and the work of Frantz Fanon. Applying Buttigieg’s reading of Gramsci’s anti-dogmatic philological method to Third-Worldism allows us to see how it renovated Marxism’s revolutionary scope and its emancipatory futures, and ultimately helped to decolonize Marxism.


Publication metadata

Author(s): Srivastava N

Publication type: Article

Publication status: Published

Journal: Italian Culture

Year: 2022

Volume: 40

Issue: 1

Pages: 49-60

Online publication date: 08/06/2022

Acceptance date: 02/04/2018

Date deposited: 16/08/2023

ISSN (print): 0161-4622

ISSN (electronic): 1559-0909

Publisher: Taylor and Francis

URL: https://doi.org/10.1080/01614622.2022.2058187

DOI: 10.1080/01614622.2022.2058187


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