"Which Way Is America?": Americanism and the Italian Western

Abstract

In the Prison Notebooks, Antonio Gramsci explored the role that American capitalism and its corresponding cultural forms had begun to play in European culture. He was concerned with identifying a type of worker arising from the penetration of Fordism into the European context.1 As is characteristic of Gramsci's nonreductive mode of treating questions of capitalism and culture, he did not focus on the one-to-one relationship between base and superstructure, and on the sole determining effects of economics. Most striking in his discussions of Americanism is the importance he placed on body politics, the effects on the body of new forms of social life and, reciprocally, the effects on social life of new and different bodily constraints and possibilities. His discussions of the body were not only manifest in his description of the new forms of work under Fordism in contrast to older patterns of production but were sketched in his descriptions of the increasing expressions of mechanization, antagonism, and