Antonio Gramsci: The Prison Notebooks and Us

Graduate / Professional

Antonio Gramsci is one of the most globally influential thinkers of the twentieth century. From his life and intellectual work come a set of ideas that have arguably grown more salient with time. His writing—on subjects as diverse as Marx, the opera, the social function of the modern intellectual and the politics of soccer—draws from his involvement as a militant journalist in the factory councils movement in 1919–1920 (i.e. a worker-led grassroots organization that occupied factories in Turin in a bid to seize the means of production in a key European industrial city in the aftermath of WW1) and, later, from his imprisonment for political dissent in a Fascist jail from 1926 until his untimely death in 1937. His remarkable journalistic articles and prison notes address questions that resonate throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries: How does Fascism (and its twenty-first century populist revival) emerge from the multiple crises of modern capitalist society? Under what specific circumstances does “capitalist progress” take distinctively socially conservative, reactionary forms? What is the role of the intellectual in the face of reactionary modernity, old and new? Why do blocks of working-class voters seem to vote against their own class interest, at particular historical junctures? How is hegemony forged and sustained through popular culture and the shaping of common sense, such that domination comes to appear natural, inevitable and even desirable? How does Gramsci’s “open Marxism” attend to the body and its pleasures as sites where power is inscribed and lived? How can we talk about the importance of aesthetics, leisure and embodied lifestyles without reproducing stale stories about “culture wars” and polarization? Finally, and most importantly, what possibilities does Gramsci’s thought open for radical epistemologies, aesthetics, and new forms of counter-hegemony? This course introduces graduate and undergraduate students to Gramsci’s thought by reading several examples of his preprison and prison writing on politics and culture; by examining his legacy and afterlives throughout the twentieth and twenty-first century; and by placing him in conversation with contemporary fields like women’s, gender and sexuality studies; Black studies; postcolonial studies; and disability studies. We privilege Gramsci’s subtle analysis of the profound entanglements between aesthetics, everyday life, and politics. In each seminar, we collectively unpack Gramscian keywords such as “domination,” “hegemony,” “contradictory consciousness,” “common sense,” “intellectual,” “popular culture,” and “the philosophy of praxis”. We also consider Gramsci’s direct or indirect influence on postwar and contemporary intellectuals including Pierpaolo Pasolini, Lorraine Hansberry, Stuart Hall, Adrienne Rich, bell hooks, Patricia Hill Collins, Toni Morrison, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Julietta Singh. M 1:30pm-3:25pm