Antonio Gramsci, Epistolario (Corréspondence), 1: gennaio 1906-dicembre 1922: RECENSIONE (original) (raw)

A Companion to Antonio Gramsci (Brill 2020)

Brill, 2020

In "A Companion to Antonio Gramsci" some of the most important Italian scholars of Gramsci's thought realize an intellectual account of the Gramscian historiography. The volume is organized into five parts. In the first, an updated reconstruction of his biographical events is offered. The second part provides three different perspectives permitting an analysis of the ideas and theories of history which emerge from Gramsci’s writings. In the third section as well as the fourth section, the most explicitly political themes are considered. Finally, in the last part the timelines of twentieth century historiography in Italy are traced and a picture is painted of the reasons for the development of the principal problems surrounding the international literary output on Gramsci. Contributors include: Alberto Burgio, Davide Cadeddu, Giuseppe Cospito, Angelo d’Orsi, Michele Filippini, Guido Liguori, Marcello Montanari, Vittorio Morfino, Stefano Petrucciani, Michele Prospero, Leonardo Rapone, Giuseppe Vacca, and Marzio Zanantoni.

Review: Gramsci in the World ed. by Roberto M. Dainotto and Fredric Jameson

H-Italy, 2021

On July 19, 1928, Antonio Gramsci — a rabble-rousing factory organizer originally from Sardinia and, perhaps most important, the founder of the Communist Party of Italy (CPI) — walked through the gates of Turi Prison on the outskirts of the southern Italian city of Bari to begin serving a twenty-year sentence. Hunched and disfigured from a life-long struggle with arteriosclerosis, the then thirty-seven-year-old Gramsci was not being incarcerated by Benito Mussolini’s dictatorship for any violent offenses. Indeed, Grasmci’s only “crime” had been his influential role as Italy’s — and, increasingly so, Europe’s — preeminent Marxist intellectual. As one of the regime’s prosecutors in Gramsci’s case phrased it, illustrating the fascist regime’s anxieties with respect to the middle-aged Sardinian’s revolutionary program in Italy, “for twenty years we must stop this brain from functioning.” Despite the efforts put forth by Il Duce’s regime in silencing him, however, Gramsci’s mind, unencumbered by his increasingly poor health, would go on to produce some of the most brilliant and deeply influential political philosophy of the twentieth century. Beginning in 1929 — the year after his arrival at Turi Prison — and ending in 1935, Gram‐ sci produced over thirty notebooks consisting of some three thousand pages of short essays, notes, and conceptual fragments on a wide variety of topics and themes, ranging from the many roles played by “organic intellectuals” in forging bourgeois modernity (as well as in sharpening the industrial proletariat’s revolutionary potential in overcoming capitalism) to, perhaps Gramsci’s most lastingly influential concept, the significance of “cultural hegemony” in manufacturing and controlling any given society’s collective beliefs, values, and practices. Volumes of historiographical and political scientific literature have been written on Gramsci’s life and work in Italy. But what about the Italian revolutionary’s various posthumous, global influences in places well beyond Europe’s geopolitical boundaries? When and in which sociopolitical contexts did Gramsci’s writings gain traction among the global Marxist Left? And what were the factors behind Gramsci’s presences, as well as absences, among Marxist thinkers during the eighty- four years since the CPI founder’s untimely passing? Such are some of the questions taken up by the various studies featured in Roberto M. Dainotto and Fredric Jameson’s rich and intellectually ambitious edited volume, Gramsci in the World.

PAST AND PRESENT. Philosophy, Politics, and History in the Thought of Gramsci

International Conference 18-19 June 2015 King’s College London (Strand Campus*) *Venue map: http://www.kcl.ac.uk/campuslife/campuses/strand/Strand.aspx This International Conference on the thought of Antonio Gramsci will bring together a new generation of 45 scholars from 16 countries working on Gramscian themes in order to engage closely with his writings. The conference is open to all, however registration is essential if you would like to attend. To register, please send an email to: gramsciconference2015@gmail.com. [This programme will be updated - so please check back before conference for latest version]

Using Gramsci: A New Approach, Pluto Press, London-New York, 2017.

2017

This is a new approach to one of the greatest political theorists, Antonio Gramsci. Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks are one of the most popular Marxist texts available and continue to inspire readers across the world. In Using Gramsci, Michele Filippini proposes a new approach based on the analysis of previously ignored concepts in his works, creating a book which stands apart. Including chapters on ideology, the individual, collective organisms, society, crisis and temporality, Using Gramsci offers a new pattern in Gramscian studies aimed to speak to the broader audience of social sciences scholars. The tools that are provided in this book extend the uses of Gramsci beyond the field of political theory and Marxism, while remaining firmly rooted in his writings. Working from the original Italian texts, Filippini also examines the more traditional areas of Gramsci’s thought, including hegemony, organic intellectuals and civil society.