Philological Method and Subaltern Pasts

This essay argues that Antonio Gramsci should be considered a postcolonial thinker. This is not an exercise in presenting the “legacy” of a European Marxist’s thought in the Third World. The aim here, rather, is to determine how Gramscian thought can be read as anticolonial, and how he related empire to the hegemonic-subaltern dialectic that structured his political theories. I engage with Joseph Buttigieg’s well-known essay “Gramsci’s Method” in order to explore how the philological method adopted in the Prison Notebooks offers several important insights for postcolonial studies, and bears obvious connections to the work of the Subaltern Studies historians, especially in terms of how it is central to the retrieval of subaltern pasts. I further argue that Gramsci’s interest in the national-popular and in forms of progressive nationalism that were grounded in internationalist solidarity suggests strong connections with Third Worldist theories of liberation struggles, such as tricontinentalism and the work of Frantz Fanon. Applying Buttigieg’s way of reading of Gramsci’s anti-dogmatic philological method to Third Worldism allows us to see how it renovated Marxism’s revolutionary aims and emancipatory futures, and ultimately helped to decolonize Marxism.