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

Decolonization in the Heart of Empire: Some Fanonian Echoes in France Today

 by Stefan Kipfer, Antipode, 2011 (Click here to download this paper in pdf.)

This paper offers a translation of key texts by the contemporary Mouvement des Indigènes de la République (MIR) and its key intellectuals: Sadri Khiari and Houria Bouteldja. Following Khiari, post-colonial situations are best understood as recompositions: territorially mediated re-articulations of colonial pasts with other social relations. To respond to the complexities of this post-colonial recomposition, MIR propose an ambitious politics of “autonomy” and “mixity”. “Autonomy” (externally in relationship to the state and organized politics and internally for feminist groups) is seen as an indispensable precondition for a socio-politically mixed, and potentially universalizing, political formation politics. More counter-colonial than post-colonial in orientation (Hallward), MIR attempt to give direction to three decades of revolt emanating from France's racialized popular neighbourhoods, including the uprising of 2005. I argue that MIR's interventions take up themes from the analyses by Frantz Fanon, Albert Memmi and Suzanne and Aimé Césaire to make countercolonial critique “live” in France today.

Fanon and space: colonization, urbanization, and liberation from the colonial to the global city

by Stefan Kipfer, Environment and Planning: Society and Space,  2007, volume 25, pages 701 - 726.

Stimulated by recent controversies about the headscarf in France, this paper offers a fresh look at the spatial and urban dimensions of the work of Frantz Fanon. While there is widespread agreement that the work of Fanon (which preceded the so-called `spatial turn' in social theory) includes powerful spatial dimensions, there is no consensus about the status of `space' in Fanon's texts. Postcolonial theorists, whose reading of Fanon dominated the Anglo-American academic world until recently, have applauded the prevalence of spatial metaphors in Fanon's work as a sign for the latter's discomfort with dialectical thought and matters of historical transformation and thus as a sign for `third-space' thinking. Representing a new, heterodox wave of Fanon interpretation and insisting on Fanon's Hegelian-Marxist, radical Black, and phenomenological preoccupations with liberation, other readers have detected a shift from spatial to temporal concerns in Fanon's work. While building on this latter reading of Fanon, I argue that the spatial aspects in Fanon's work are neither a function of a philosophical imperative of nonrepresentability nor in contradiction with his concerns about temporal transformation.