Why Gramsci's Time Has Come (Again)

Abstract

While never really disappearing from the canon of postcolonial thought, Gramsci's influence faded in the 1990s and early 2000s. This paper offers an explanation of this aspect of the trajectory of his legacy, paying particular attention to conceptions of power as reaching deeply and unconsciously into subjectivity, which especially dominated the intellectual landscape of North American during the 1980s and 1990s. There is in Gramsci's Prison Notebooks, however, an under-recognized aspect of empowerment of those who are subject to the ideas of ruling elites, particularly in his approach to hegemony. Gramsci offers an antidote to the more fatalistic approaches to the unconscious sources of political legitimacy and institutional power that have comprised a dominant intellectual current in the social sciences and humanities during at least the past three decades.

Keywords: Gramsci, Hegemony, Postcolonialism, Subaltern Studies