Theory, practice, activism

Abstract

Recent decades have brought a new interest in the philological strand of Gramsci’s work and in his pioneering role in theorising translation. Themes and concepts from the Prison Notebooks have been also picked up by scholars working in the field of (critical) discourse analysis, and incorporated into theories that look at the construction of social issues in media, literature, and culture more generally. This chapter brings these different threads, scattered across Gramsci’s oeuvre, together to offer a reflection on the interconnections of translation and activism. While Gramsci does not explicitly cast translation as a form of social or political activism, I argue that this link follows from his observations on the relation between theory into practice, which he casts as a form of ‘translation,’ combined with his concept of ‘historical bloc.’ I discuss three different meanings of the term ‘translation’ in Gramsci’s work and show how each can be related to social activism. This chapter also demonstrates how a Gramscian theory of translation can be used in analysing texts as activist acts. Finally, I examine what Gramsci’s theory of translation teaches us about current ideological struggles in contemporary Poland.