Gill Hart: 'Political Society' & Its Discontents: South African Reflections on Indian Debates

The pedagogy of road blockades

Anne Harley, Interface

Road blockades have long since been a tool of struggle, and in recent months have featured in protests in South Africa, Guinea, Mozambique, Nigeria,  Palestine, Chile, Brazil, Argentina, India, Canada, Turkey, and probably in  most other countries in the world. Whilst some road blockades might be considered spontaneous eruptions of anger, with little reflective thought  involved, others are clearly part of conscious praxis, a tactic reflecting Gramsci’s ‘war of manoeuvre’. However, I argue, road blockades are also used as a counter-hegemonic pedagogical tool in a ‘war of position’, as one of the associated pedagogies within the “multi-faceted praxis and political strategy” of Subaltern Social Movements (Kapoor, 2011). The article uses two such movements, Abahlali baseMjondolo in South Africa, and the piqueteros in Argentina, to explore this claim.

Gramsci and the Postcolonial World

The Postcolonial Gramsci edited by Neelam Srivastava and Baidik Bhattacharya (New York: Routledge), 2012; pp 288, £85

Reviewed by Arun K. Patnaik, Economic & Political Weekly

The book under review, while explaining the relevance of Gramsci’s thoughts in the postcolonial world, deals with three key concerns: the role of intellectuals, cultural hegemony and neo-liberal political economy. Drawing upon the above three resources from different geographies in the postcolonial world, the book draws our attention to how Gramsci’s ideas have travelled across the globe from Peru, Algeria, India to China and elsewhere.

The Gramscian Moment: Philosophy, Hegemony and Marxism

The Gramscian Moment

Click here to download this book in pdf.

“The Gramscian Moment demonstrates the extent to which Gramsci’s thought represents a singular synthesis of virtually the entire tradition of Western political thought. This work succeeds in presenting Gramsci as a 'living classic', an author central to our understanding of modernity. Given its scope, richness and originality, I have no doubt that this work will represent a milestone in Gramscian scholarship and an important contribution to contemporary debates in political theory and philosophy.”

—Stathis Kouvelakis, Author of Philosophy and Revolution and Co-editor of The Critical Companion to Contemporary Marxism

Himani Bannerji: A pedagogy of Decolonization - Tagore, Gramsci, Fanon

Rethinking the South African Crisis: Nationalism, Populism, Hegemony

Rethinking the South African Crisis

We are very pleased to announce that Gillian Hart will be giving this year’s Thinking Africa Public Lecture on the 15th of August. Gillian Hart is Professor of Geography and Co-Chair of Development Studies, University of California, Berkeley, and Honorary Professor, University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. Gillian Hart’s forthcoming book is about to come out with UKZN Press.

The publishers describe the book as follows:

“Rethinking the South African Crisis revisits longstanding debates to shed new light on the transition from apartheid. Drawing on nearly twenty years of ethnographic research, Gillian Hart argues that local government has become the key site of contradictions. Local practices, conflicts and struggles in the arenas of everyday life, feed into and are shaped by simultaneous processes of de-nationalisation and renationalisation. Together they are key to understanding the erosion of ANC domination, and the proliferation of populist politics. This book provides an innovative and forceful dialectical analysis of the ongoing, unstable and unresolved processes through which the crisis in South Africa is playing out. It also suggests how Gramsci’s concept of passive revolution, adapted and translated in relation to present circumstances, can do useful analytical and political work in South Africa and beyond.” 

Gramsci’s Ashes by Pier Paolo Pasolini (1957)

It’s not like May, this impure air

that darkens the foreign garden

already dark, then blinds it with light

with blinding clarity… this sky

of foam, above the pale yellow eaves

that in enormous semicircles veil

the bends of the Tiber, the deep blue

mountains of Latium… Spilling a mortal

peace, estranged from our destinies,

between the ancient walls, autumnal

May. In this the grey of the world,

the end of the decade in which appears

among ruins the profound, ingenuous

effort to restore life over;

the silence, rotten and barren…

Stuart Hall: Hall - Race, Articulation, and Societies Structured in Dominance (1980)

9a. Hall - Race, Articulation, and Societies Structured in Dominance.pdf by John Alexander Castañeda Rodríguez

Gramsci: Space, Nature, Politics

Michael Ekers (Editor), Gillian Hart (Editor), Stefan Kipfer (Editor), Alex Loftus (Editor) 

This unique collection is the first to bring attention to Antonio Gramsci’s work within geographical debates. Presenting a substantially different reading to Gramsci scholarship, the collection forges a new approach within human geography, environmental studies and development theory.

• Offers the first sustained attempt to foreground Antonio Gramsci’s work within geographical debates
• Demonstrates how Gramsci articulates a rich spatial sensibility whilst developing a distinctive approach to geographical questions
• Presents a substantially different reading of Gramsci from dominant post-Marxist perspectives, as well as more recent anarchist and post-anarchist critiques
• Builds on the emergence of Gramsci scholarship in recent years, taking this forward through studies across multiple continents, and asking how his writings might engage with and animate political movements today
• Forges a new approach within human geography, environmental studies and development theory, building on Gramsci’s innovative philosophy of praxis

Marikana: A Point of Rupture?

by Ben Fogel, Insurgent Notes, 2012

A crisis occurs, sometimes lasting for decades. This exceptional duration means that incurable structural contradictions have revealed themselves (reached maturity) and that, despite this, the political forces which are struggling to conserve and defend the existing structure itself are making every effort to cure them, within certain limits, and to overcome them. These incessant and persistent efforts…form the terrain of the “conjunctural” and it is upon this terrain that the forces of opposition organise.[1]

Gramsci & Hegemony: Peter D. Thomas

Gramsci: Everything that Concerns People

Some aspects of the southern question

by Antonio Gramsci, Unfinished, October 1926

These notes were initially stimulated by the publication of an article on the Southern question by "Ulenspiegel" in the 18 September issue of the journal Quarto Stato, and by the somewhat comical editorial presentation which preceded it. "Ulenspiegel" informed his readers of Guido Dorso's recent book La Rivoluzione meridionale (pub. Piero Gobetti, Turin, 1925), and alluded to the author's assessment of our party's position on the southern question. 246 In their presentation, the editors of Quarto Stato - who proclaim themselves to be "young people who know the Southern problem thoroughly in its general lines" [sic] - protest Collectively at the idea that the Communist Party can be accorded any "merits". Nothing wrong so far: young people of the Quarto Stato type have always and everywhere expressed extreme opinions and violent protests on paper, without the paper rebelling. But then these "young people" add the following words: "We have not forgotten that the magical formula of the Turin Communists used to be: divide the big estates among the rural proletariat. This formula is at the antipodes from any sound, realistic vision of the Southern problem." And here it becomes necessary to set the record straight, since the only thing that is "magical" is the impudence and superficial dilettantism of the "young" writers of Quarto Stato.

Antonio Gramsci: Life of a Revolutionary

by Giuseppe Fiori

Translated by Tom Nairn

“A model of political biography.”—Guardian

Antonio Gramsci was born in Sardinia in 1891, became the leader of the Italian Communist Party in his early thirties, was arrested by Mussolini’s police in 1927, and remained imprisoned until shortly before his death ten years later. The posthumous publication of his Prison Notebooks established him as a major thinker whose influence continues to increase.

Online Excerpts from Gramsci's 'Prison Notebooks'

I. PROBLEMS OF HISTORY AND CULTURE

1. The Intellectuals
2. On Education

The Antonio Gramsci Reader: Selected Writings 1916-1935

David Forgacs has produced a significant one-volume collection of most of the important writings of Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937), a political thinker who has gained great influence in recent years. Forgacs stresses the "complexity and vitality" of Gramsci's views on hegemony, war, art, education, and popular culture, as well as politics. The book is divided into two parts--the first covers the period from 1916-26, the second comes from Gramsci's notebooks written while imprisoned by the Fascists. Particularly valuable are the chapter introductions and a glossary of key terms which facilitate an understanding of Gramsci's philosophy.

DOWNLOAD: http://ifile.it/2mkez7t

This book is also online in pdf here.

The Provocations of Neoliberalism: Contesting the Nation and Liberation after Apartheid

Gillian Hart, Antipode,Volume 40, Issue 4, pages 678–705, September 2008 
(This paper is also available in pdf here)

This paper is part of an ongoing effort to make sense of the turbulent forces at play in South Africa in relation to other parts of the world. Engaging debates over neoliberalism from a South African vantage point, I show how currently influential theories cast in terms of class project, governmentality, and hegemony are at best partial. A more adequate understanding is not just a matter of combining these different dimensions into a more encompassing model of “neoliberalism in general”. The challenge, rather, is coming to grips with how identifiably neoliberal projects and practices operate on terrains that always exceed them. A crucially important dimension of what is going on in South Africa is that escalating struggles over the material conditions of life and livelihood are simultaneously struggles over the meaning of the nation and liberation, as well as expressions of profound betrayal. These processes underscore the analytical and political stakes in attending to interconnected historical geographies of specifically racialized forms of dispossession, and how they feature in the present. The paper concludes with a call for a properly post-colonial frame of understanding that builds on the synergies and complementarities between a Gramscian reading of Fanon and relational conceptions of the production of space set forth by Lefebvre.