Race, class, and religion: Gramsci’s conception of subalternity

Abstract

Antonio Gramsci’s conception of subalternity is one of his major contributions to social and political theory. He conceived the category of subalternity to identify and analyze subordinated social groups whose political activity was either ignored, misrepresented, or on the margins of dominant history. Though Gramsci’s writings have generated new ways of rethinking nationalist history and postcoloniality (Guha 2011; Srivastava and Bhattacharya 2012), limited readings of his Prison Notebooks have concealed the complex nature of his understanding of subalternity. As the epigraph above illustrates, Gramsci conceived subalternity in terms of race, culture, and religion – among other factors. However, many scholars have interpreted the meaning of the ‘subaltern’ in the Prison Notebooks solely in terms of class, asserting that the word is code for ‘proletariat’, borne out of prison censorship (e.g., Beverley 2004; Brennan 2006; Chaturvedi 2007; Spivak 1992, 2000). Others have argued that Gramsci did not write on race, ethnicity, or racism (Hall 1986), that race was not a central concern of Gramsci (Mignolo 2012), and that his ‘unraced’ concepts actually perpetuate racist antagonisms (Wilderson 2003). Such interpretations overlook the complex nature of Gramsci’s understanding of subalternity and how sociopolitical elements, such as race and religion, feature in his analysis. Far from being simply a code or cypher, the concept of the subaltern is a major component of Gramsci’s critical investigation of the forces and relations of politics (Green 2011a). This investigation includes the analysis of the relation between dominant and subordinate groups and the ways in which political power is organized, expressed, institutionalized, maintained, and transformed. In Gramsci’s overall investigation of politics, the concept of the subaltern constitutes a category of political investigation itself, intended to provide insights into the relations of power and hegemony. In many ways, the intricacies of subalternity can be understood in dialectical relation to the complexity of hegemony – that is,subalternity functions within an ensemble of economic, political, ideological, cultural, and social relations, which are manifested in political institutions as well as in morality, customs, religion, folklore, and common sense.1 Gramsci’s analysis of subalternity is ultimately linked to political praxis, for it is his intent to uncover the factors and conditions that contribute to subordination, as well as the impediments that prevent subaltern groups from achieving political power. The concerns of race, class, and religion all appear in Notebook 25 – the ‘special notebook’ Gramsci devoted exclusively to the topic of subaltern, which he entitled ‘On the margins of history: history of subaltern groups’. The major notes in the notebook include discussions of class divisions and class politics, but Gramsci does not reduce subalternity to class. The significance of his comments on race and religion in Notebook 25 are not immediately apparent, but when his observations are viewed in relation to major motifs in his work, such as the Southern Question, the Risorgimento, Lorianism, and common sense, the concerns of race and religion as they relate to subalternity are brought into relief. Throughout the Prison Notebooks, Gramsci makes the point that the Risorgimento constituted a non-national popular movement that excluded the active participation of the masses and institutionalized the North’s authority over the South. A stratum of Italian intellectuals – which Gramsci labeled as ‘Lorian’ and who were associated with absurd pseudoscientific notions – reinforced the undemocratic and semi-colonial nature of the Italian state with racist theories of Southern inferiority. Given the extremely narrow political space for peasants to act in this context, many considered religion as a source to overcome their conditions, but as Gramsci points out, the Church’s own worldview reinforced the subordinate position of subaltern groups. The interconnection of these separate lines of inquiry demonstrates how subalternity is intertwined with national and colonial processes, as well as with the power of intellectuals in shaping culture and political discourse.