“Gramsci and Du Bois: Towards a Reconceptualization of the South” by Antonio Fontana on Friday, February 20 from 3-4pm in Oak 438.
Antonio Gramsci’s analysis of the Italian South and of the Southern Italian peasantry in relation to the formation of a radical politics of emancipation constitutes one of the most salient features of his critique of orthodox Marxism. For Gramsci, any attempt to institute radical social change in Italy is tied to the attempt to critically evaluate the socio-cultural and political history of the Southern Italian peasantry in relation to the hegemonic cultural and political norms of Northern Europe and, indeed, of Western Europe as a whole. This paper will attempt to argue that for the Italian Marxist theorist, the liberation of the Italian peasantry is not only a project of social, economic, and political emancipation. Rather, the peasantry’s emancipation is also seen as a project of cultural liberation, a liberation from the dominant strands of rationalist and positivist Enlightenment thought, which Gramsci saw as encapsulated in Crocean and post-Hegelian philosophy. The formation of a class of organic intellectuals within the ranks of the working class and peasantry is deemed instrumental in creating a sphere of cultural, as well as political, hegemony. The task of the organic intellectuals is to create an ideational sphere in which the colonized South can potentially articulate and celebrate a culture that has historically been deemed backward and primitive. However, Gramsci’s analyses of the South, it will be argued, also contains historicist and positivist encrustations, which create a dialectical tension in his theory of politico-cultural emancipation that has never really been solved. The paper will also look at how W.E. B. Du Bois, in The Souls of Black Folk and in Black Reconstruction in America, also presents a project of cultural and political emancipation. It will be argued that Du Bois also subscribes to a historicist, and even racialist, conception of black emancipation, and that this theoretical tension precludes Du Bois from recognizing the emancipatory potential of the sub-culture of opposition found in the post-Emancipation black South. The paper will actively engage with the thoughts and contradictions found in Gramsci and Du Bois in an attempt to tease out the elements of emancipation and liberation found in both thinkers, and see if both Gramsci and Du Bois can help us formulate a sub-culture of opposition against Western and capitalist notions of rationality and normality.
For more information, contact: PSGSA at (860) 486-2440