Gramsci and The South as a Space of Emancipation

Antonio Fontana

doi:10.34102/italdeb/2018/4660

Abstract

The paper will actively engage with the contradictions found in Gramsci in an attempt to tease out the elements of emancipation found in his thought, as well as a sub-culture of opposition against Western notions of rationality. Antonio Gramsci’s analysis of the Italian South and of the Southern Italian peasantry in relation to the formation of a radical politics of emancipation constitutes one of the most salient features of his critique of orthodox Marxism. I argue that for the Italian Marxist theorist, the liberation of the Italian peasantry is not only a project of social, economic and political emancipation. Rather, the peasantry’s emancipation is also seen as a project of cultural liberation, a liberation from the dominant strands of rationalist and positivist Enlightenment thought, which Gramsci saw as encapsulated in Crocean philosophy. For Gramsci, the task of the organic intellectuals is to create an ideational sphere in which the colonized South can potentially articulate and celebrate a culture that has historically been deemed backward and primitive. However, Gramsci’s analyses of the South also contain historicist encrustations, which create a dialectical tension in his theory of politico-cultural emancipation that has never really been solved. I argue that the positivist and progressionist encrustations of Gramsci’s program for the emancipation of the South is an instantiation of a wider, Western, 19th and 20th century intellectual tradition which conflates “progress” as such with emancipation, a tradition that goes beyond the Italian and European context, and that is even paralleled by the model for black emancipation in the American South put forth by a figure as seemingly divergent as, say, W.E. B. Du Bois in the The Souls of Black Folk (1903).

Highlights

This paper attempts to review and deconstruct the key theoretical approaches and formulations on literacy and its relation to cultural and political domination and hegemony, as well as coloniality, found in the literary, poetic, and even theoretical, writings, of the Italian leftist filmmaker, essayist, novelist, and poet, Pier Paolo Pasolini
Bourdieu and Pasolini: The Meaning of Southern Italian Dialect Perhaps what struck me the most in reading Bourdieu was his discussion in Chapter One of his work Language and Symbolic Power (1994), of the formation of a “standard” linguistic “market” during the revolutionary era in eighteenth century France
Though glaringly dissimilar In some of their methodological and theoretical approaches, both Gramsci and Pasolini effectively illustrate (and confirm) the veracity and pressing, urgent, legitimacy, of the problems the three theorists I have engaged with throughout this paper have dealt with: that is, the invaluable fruitfulness of the historical method, the recognition of the inherent value, humanity, and often strategic necessity of, modes of linguistic usage that have been deemed “inferior” historically, and the inextricable connection between cultural and linguistic domination (and prejudice) with processes of (external and internal) (neo-) colonization, domination, and imperialist expansion

Summary

Introduction

This paper attempts to review and deconstruct the key theoretical approaches and formulations on literacy and its relation to cultural and political domination and hegemony, as well as coloniality, found in the literary, poetic, and even theoretical, writings, of the Italian leftist filmmaker, essayist, novelist, and poet, Pier Paolo Pasolini. Throughout the paper, I have decided to rely methodologically upon the theoretical and conceptual tools used to analyze key and fundamental historical processes that are explicated and deployed by Rama, Mignolo, and Bourdieu, to delineate and highlight to the reader how literacy and the struggle over what constitutes literacy is (within , but not limited to, the Southern Italian peasant milieu) often a struggle against and for linguistic and cultural colonization; in the Italian case, such a struggle has taken place within the parameters of internal colonization and conquest, but the theoretical and methodological parameters are still essentially the same. Of particular relevance and import for devising the methodological and analytical approach I have decided to take are Rama’s extremely useful and fascinating concept of the letrados (or lettered class), and Mignolo’s decision to look at literacy through the lens of , not just colonization as such, but through the prism of concrete socio-political and cultural, history. Mignolo’s decision to locate struggles over literacy and its meaning within the crucible of history, of historical struggles of domination and self-determination, has been, methodologically, at least, of invaluable use for me, for it has enabled me to approach literacy, the concept of literacy as such, throughout this paper, as not an ahistorical and “value-free” notion, but rather, as a social and cultural practice that is often shaped and determined by concrete (and often highly-invested) historical forces and struggles

Bourdieu and Pasolini

Dialect and Colonization

Conclusion