Gramsci and Geography

Abstract

On 16 May 1925, Antonio Gramsci delivered his first and only speech in the Italian Parliament. An elected deputy of the Italian Communist Party, he spoke out against Fascist efforts to “liquidate” his party. He denounced arrests of his fellow leaders, arguing, “You are doing what they used to do in the South, when they hired thugs to arrest anyone who voted for the opposition.” The Fascists in Parliament, including his adversary Benito Mussolini, continually interrupted Gramsci, asserting that he “knew nothing of the South.” Gramsci responded emphatically, “I am a southerner.” He proceeded to offer a distinctly spatial set of insights. He noted that the state was expropriating resources from peasants in the South and using them to exploit workers in factories of the North. The defeat of Fascism, he believed, would require a class alliance between northern workers and southern peasants. “Upon this terrain,” he argued, workers and peasants could organize “against their common enemy.” After the speech, Mussolini approached Gramsci as he drank coffee at the bar. Mussolini reached out his hand in congratulation, but, as biographer Giuseppe Fiori recounts, Gramsci “continued sipping his coffee indifferently.” This article demonstrates Gramsci’s relevance for the study of geography. It includes biographical information about Gramsci, a discussion of his main published works, and a brief summary of some important works in the field. It describes Gramsci’s long history as a student of the field, having studied geography and linguistics at the University of Turin under Professor Mario Bartoli in the 1910s. It traces Gramsci’s development as a spatial thinker in his speeches, political writing, and journalism as a leader of the Italian Communist Party. It describes how his attention to issues of space developed alongside Fascism’s rise as a state form. It considers how his unfinished 1926 essay, “Some Aspects of the Southern Question,” offered a historical and geographical method for analyzing the dialectics of class, region, and political economy and culture—including the articulation of race and class. Though this article includes “The Southern Question,” as well as critical engagements with it, it does not limit his contributions to geography to this one piece. It specifically foregrounds Gramsci’s method of conjunctural analysis articulated in the Prison Notebooks. It features an array of geographers who have engaged with his work, and also includes spatial thinkers across the disciplines who approach Gramscian concepts and categories. Amid a global resurgence of white nationalism and neofascism, and what, following Gramsci, we might call an “organic crisis” of US hegemony and global capitalism on a world scale, engagements with Gramsci’s spatial insights are warranted.