Language and Hegemony in Gramsci (2024)

International Journal of Cultural Policy, 2010

New Left Review 176, 1989

This is a review of those excerpts regarding Gramsci's thoughts on philosophy in the Prison Notebooks.

A specter is haunting the globalized world: the specterof Antonio Gramsci. Too many people evoke it: subversiveintellectuals and rapper philosophers, staid politicalanalysts and acute scholars of cultural phenomena.Survived by the defeat of his official commentators, theauthor of the Prison Notebooks continues to enjoy apopularity that seems a posthumous triumph.At the crossroads of narrative form and argumentativerigor, Michele Filippini examines the guidelines of themany gramscisms. From the rebel languages of African-American communities to the hegemonic strategies ofneo-conservative think tanks, from the reflections onpostcolonialism to the folds of mass culture, from leftto right, from right to left, an unprecedented and unknownportrait of Gramsci comes out from this analysis.An iconography light-years away from the liturgicalblack and white image of the twentieth century.The cosmopolitan, metropolitan, prophetic, cinematographic,radical, reactionary, distorted, hallucinatory,paranoid, but always pop interpretations consideredin these pages give back to us the image of a GlobalGramsci.

This chapter is included in a volume "Great Books Written in Prison: Essays on Classic Works from Plato to Martin Luther King, Jr." ( McFarland Press, 2015). The volume is geared towards undergraduates and the general reading public. The webpage can be found here: http://www.greatbookswritteninprison.com

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.

Revisiting Gramsci’s Notebooks, 2020

Building on recent ground-breaking scholarship on the role of translation in Gramsci’s biography and theory (Carlucci, 2013; Sen, 2003), this paper presents an analysis of selected fragments from the “Prison Notebooks” in their Polish editions (1961, 1991). The aim of this exercise is to examine the translations of Gramsci’s text from the point of view of his own complex theory of translation and translatability. The method used in the chapter pertains to Translation Studies, but reflections inspired by the corpus apply not only to the realm of language and translation but also to politics and broadly-understood struggles over hegemony. The conclusion of the article is that the shape of the existing Polish translations of the “Prison Notebooks” was conditioned by the specific historical circumstances in which they were commissioned and published. In consequence, Gramsci is presented to the Polish public either as a classic of Marxist thought (first edition) or as a 'classic' philosopher tout court (second edition) – both of which suggest his work is a thing of the past, rather than a valid contemporary point of reference. In the closing section of the article I reflect on translation as a possible means of changing this state of affairs.Note: this is a manuscript.The full published paper is: "Translations of the PrisonNotebooks into Polish: AGramscian Analysis", inAntonini, Francesca, Aaron Bernstein,Lorenzo Fusaro, and Robert Jackson,eds. Revisiting Gramsci’s Notebooks(Brill, 2020)For the full pdf go to https://brill.com/view/book/edcoll/9789004417694/BP000009.xml or simply contact me via Academia.edu or email: m.n.wroblewska@gmail.com

Revisiting Gramsci’s Notebooks. Historical Materialism Book Series, Volume: 205, 2020

Building on recent ground-breaking scholarship on the role of translation in Gramsci’s biography and theory (Carlucci, 2013; Sen, 2003), this paper presents an analysis of selected fragments from the “Prison Notebooks” in their Polish editions (1961, 1991). The aim of this exercise is to examine the translations of Gramsci’s text from the point of view of his own complex theory of translation and translatability. The method used in the chapter pertains to Translation Studies, but reflections inspired by the corpus apply not only to the realm of language and translation but also to politics and broadly-understood struggles over hegemony. The conclusion of the article is that the shape of the existing Polish translations of the “Prison Notebooks” was conditioned by the specific historical circumstances in which they were commissioned and published. In consequence, Gramsci is presented to the Polish public either as a classic of Marxist thought (first edition) or as a 'classic' philosopher tout court (second edition) – both of which suggest his work is a thing of the past, rather than a valid contemporary point of reference. In the closing section of the article I reflect on translation as a possible means of changing this state of affairs.Note: this is a manuscript.The full published paper is: "Translations of the PrisonNotebooks into Polish: AGramscian Analysis", inAntonini, Francesca, Aaron Bernstein,Lorenzo Fusaro, and Robert Jackson,eds. Revisiting Gramsci’s Notebooks(Brill, 2020)For the full pdf go to https://brill.com/view/book/edcoll/9789004417694/BP000009.xml or simply contact me via Academia.edu or email: m.n.wroblewska@gmail.com