Gramsci and the Southern Question: Global Readings, Interpretations and Uses

This book looks at the Southern question in Antonio Gramsci. It takes this as an opportunity to reflect on the special nature of his thought, linked to the concepts of hegemony, subalternity and the critique of the particular culturalidentitarian and ideological forms of the South and its historical development. Although the category was originally applied to the politics and history of Italy, the debates on the Southern question have in recent times gained wider relevance, combining with today’s more general analyses relating, for example, to European geopolitics, globalisation and the various global Souths, to media and mass culture, etc. In other areas, the Southern question in Gramsci has taken the form of a materialist epistemology, connected to the historical phenomenon of the splitting of consciousness, as opposed to its unity on a theoretical level. Elsewhere, it has become a programme for the application of a strategy of the international left, based on the building of alliances between different groups of subalterns. Over time, Gramsci's thought has come into contact with other partly converging perspectives, such as critical urban theory and cultural and subaltern studies. This has given rise to numerous fruitful lines of research in which the Southern question has been extended from Italy’s own North-South divide to other contexts. What aspect of Gramsci’s thought could justify this issue taking on such importance? Gramsci and the Southern Question: Global Readings, Interpretations and Uses aims to answer this question by combining general theoretical approaches with studies on the reception of Gramscian concepts in the world’s Souths.

Table of Contents:
Introduction. Part One. The Southern Question in Gramsci Between History and Theory. 1. The Southern Question in Gramsci, Between Salvemini and Lenin 2. Gramsci’s Southern Question Between Hegemony and Revolution in the West 3. Antonio Gramsci: The Southern Question, Americanism and “National Life” 4. Plan and Autonomy. The Southern Question from Gramsci to Italian operaismo. Part Two. From the Southern Question to Subaltern Studies. Interdisciplinary Approaches. 5. Postcolonial Gramsci? From the Southern Question to Postcolonial Studies. 6. From the creative popular spirit to the subject of lack. Gramscian variations on subalternity and its sources. 7. School and subalternity in the thought of Antonio Gramsci. 8. Dialect, grammar and the antithetical function of the philosophy of praxis in the Prison Notebooks. 9. Aesthetics and Popular Culture in Antonio Gramsci. 10. Subalternity and Baroque Culture. A Gramscian reading of communication studies in the Global South. 11. Southern Question and Subalternization. A Gramscian analysis of power asymmetries in the European Union. Part Three. Some case studies: The “Southern Question” in Europe, Arab World and Latin America. 12. Gramsci's Southern Question in Spain. 13. The “Southern Question” in Latin America: receptions, interpretations and translations. 14. Gramsci and the Arab New Lefts: making sense of the early translations. 15. A Gramscian analytical perspective about the Arab countries. A Long Southern Question?