Abstract
In the last four decades the name of Gramsci has spread well beyond the boundaries of Italian political theory and Marxist thought where it was originally confined, reaching disciplinary fields as diverse as literary criticism, sociology, communication studies, anthropology, international relations, history, and linguistics, and countries as far from Italy as Korea, India, and South Africa. Why this success and still before how this success has been possible? What social conditions had to be fulfilled to have Gramsci recognized as such a key author in so many intellectual fields and regions of the world? Making use of an exceptional data set, i.e. the Gramscian Bibliography created and managed by the “Gramsci institute” in Rome, which encompasses more than 19 thousands items (books, journal articles, conference proceedings about Gramsci, as well as the whole Gramscian production including translations and different editions), our research aims at tracing the global diffusion of Gramsci’s work in Italy and out of it since the 1940s, identifying patterns, trajectories, timing, agents, and modes of its reception in different national contexts and languages. Focusing on both translations of Gramscian texts and critical writings on and about Gramsci, the chapter will provide quantitative data about the global circulation of a thought whose international success has been certainly favored by Marxist internationalism and the Italian geopolitical location after WWII, but also hampered by the original language and the textual genres (private letters and personal notebooks written while in prison) in which it was embedded, as well as the strong national focus and disarming fragmentation of its content. We suggest that all these seemingly negative conditions exerted indeed a positive effect on the reception process, allowing for highly selective (and idiosyncratic) local appropriations, flexibility in publishing strategies, and the building of context-specific consecration strategies.
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Change history
25 July 2020
The original version of the chapter was revised: The Figure 8.4 has been replaced with an updated version of the figure.
Notes
- 1.
An incomplete list of references should mention at least the following : Rossi (1970); Eley (1984); Hobsbawm (1995); Righi (1995); Burgos (2004); Lussana and Pissarello (2008); Pala (2009); Baldussi and Manduchi (2010); Kanoussi et al. (2012); Boothman et al. (2016). Most of these writings are in Italian.
- 2.
The GB is available for inquiry online at the Gramsci Institute website. However, our research has been conducted on the original dataset the Institute made available to us. Thanks to Maria Luisa Righi of the Institute for her support and Paolo Capuzzo for his help. Thanks also to Marcus E. Green for data on the IGS membership.
- 3.
- 4.
For a wider study of Gramsci’s reception, other sources should indeed be consulted, including dictionaries, encyclopedias, and citational databases such as Scopus or Web of Science. Just to give an idea, while in the 1968 edition of the International Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences Gramsci is mentioned only once (in the entry on Marxist sociology), in Bottomore and Nisbet’s History of sociological analysis (1979), Gramsci is cited ten times. Three decades later, Ritzer’s Blackwell Encyclopaedia of Sociology (2007) refers to him as a major thinker (an entry is entirely devoted to him), with specific references to an array of conceptual items as civil society, hegemony, subaltern, and common sense. The same is true for other reference books, such as the Cambridge Dictionary of Sociology (Turner 2006). A close analysis of sources like these is beyond the limits of this chapter, but will be the object of another paper we are working on.
- 5.
There are many biographies of Gramsci; the most famous (and available in more languages) is Fiori (1966). See, more recently, Vacca (2017). For a useful, recent introduction to Gramsci(sm) in English see Hoare and Sperber (2015), originally published in French (in France). See also Santucci (2010) and Liguori and Voza (2009) for further references.
- 6.
All these categories may be found, differently combined, in the dozens of entries devoted to Gramsci in Wikipedia, the multilingual online encyclopedia.
- 7.
The circumstances of Gramsci’s death—while in prison under a dictatorship and with a chronically suffering body—presumably are not without consequence for this consecration process. For an attempt to sociologically treat the issue of post-mortem consecration, see Santoro (2010) on the case of a singer-songwriter with Communist sympathies whose trajectory has been interpreted as a failed attempt to build a new (Gramscian-style) hegemony in the field of popular music. On the circumstances of Gramsci’s imprisonment, his time as a prisoner and his death, see Spriano (1977).
- 8.
We acquired the data set directly from the Gramsci Institute in the autumn of 2014 and started our research at the beginning of 2015. As it takes time to include all the published references in the archive, we estimated that 2012 was the last complete year covered. At the time of writing, the GB comprises 20,721 items (accessed 14 June 2019). For previous publications from this same data source, but with different foci and questions, see Santoro and Gallelli (2016) and Gerli and Santoro (2018).
- 9.
On this connection, see Schneider (2000). This connection is also visible in the field of sociology, where an Italian scholar, Gino Germani, greatly contributed to the founding of the discipline in Argentina after his emigration from fascist Italy, before coming back to Italy in his sixties.
- 10.
Another organization active in the field, the International Gramsci Society (IGS), established in 1989 (see infra), periodically publishes lists of “recent works” on Gramsci in English, regardless of the country of publication. See, for instance, Hawksley (2011).
- 11.
See the Appendix for a ranked (and shortened) list of article and book chapter authors that will be discussed in a forthcoming publication.
- 12.
Its long-term editor was Ênio Silveira (1925–1996), a militant of the Partido Comunista Brasileiro. For more on him and this publishing house, see Hallewell (1982, esp. Chapter 18).
- 13.
For related information, see the Portal de Archivos Espanoles-Pares: http://pares.mcu.es/ParesBusquedas20/catalogo/autoridad/123559.
- 14.
It may be of some interest to recall here that, in 2011, the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana of Mexico City granted one of the founders, Neus Espresate, an honorary PhD for his contribution to the diffusion of knowledge in the social sciences throughout Mexico and Latin America.
- 15.
A recent analysis of the Spanish reception (Pala 2017) strongly insists on the “impossibility of publishing or approaching Marxist texts during a large part of the dictatorship by General Francisco Franco” (authors’ translation). Even into the 1950s, the only chance to directly read Marxist authors passed through the knowledge of a foreign language. In 1967, the Communist party magazine Nous Horitzons was able to host two essays on Gramsci: one by Josep Fontana and the other by the Spanish philosopher Manuel Sacristán. After 1966, however, an anthology of excerpts from the Quaderni dal carcere was available to Spanish readers, edited and translated by Jordi Solé Tura, with the title Cultura i literatura. Pala also recalls the renowned Hispanist Giulia Adinolfi, who arrived in Barcelona from Italy (and the PCI) in the mid-1950s. She was the person who brought Gramsci to Sacristán’s attention. In 1968, Solé Tura edited a Catalan version of Gramsci’s Noterelle sulla politica del Machiavelli, followed two years later by a new anthology from the Quaderni, with a more philosophical orientation. According to Pala, the real turning point in the Spanish reception of Gramsci was the massive Antología, edited by Sacristán in Spanish and published in Mexico in 1970. Afterwards, publications and translations became increasingly frequent as well as chaotic, in part owing to the inability of the Gramsci Institute, owner of Gramsci’s copyright, “to articulate an intelligent publishing policy for Spain” (authors’ translation; Pala is here referring to, and even quoting, Lussana’s work on Gramscian translations, see Lussana 2000). It is debatable, however, just how much better publishing policies would have done when orchestrated by a single subject, especially an institutional one.
- 16.
This has not prevented publications from other publishers, however—as testified by the presence of the Universidade da Coruña Press in the list of active Spanish publishers on Gramsci.
- 17.
This was the case of the first three volumes of the Guramushi Senshû [Selected Works of Gramsci], directed by Isao Yamazaki and edited by Seiji Honkawa, with comments by Kiyotomo Ishidô (1961–1962). These translations were drawn from the French edition of the Quaderni, published by the Éditions Sociales in 1959. Only after the fourth volume (1963) were the translations made from the Opere di Antonio Gramsci as published by Einaudi. The first Japanese edition of the Letters (1963) has also been translated from this Italian edition.
- 18.
Il Calendario del Popolo is one the most long-lived cultural magazines published in Italy. It was founded in 1945 on behalf of the PCI and issued monthly until 2010, when it became a quarterly publication. The editors-in-chief have been prominent personalities in Italian culture, examples being Carlo Salinari—a literary critic and partisan in Rome—and Franco Della Peruta, a historian. Supported by very active subscribers, the magazine had as its main aim the “acculturation” of the working class in post-war Italian society.
- 19.
As we can read on its official homepage, the Journal of Modern Italian Studies is “one of the leading English language forums for debate and discussion on modern Italy.” See: https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?show=aimsScope&journalCode=rmis20.
- 20.
Among the notable missing titles, we suggest Theory Culture & Society, Boundary 2, and Cultural Studies.
- 21.
- 22.
“In Japan there exist now mainly two organizations, namely the Kyoto Gramsci Society (KGS) and the Tokyo Gramsci Society (TGS), respectively associated with a number of scholars and researchers in Kyoto, the ancient Capital, and in Tokyo. For over ten years the former has been engaged in organizing a series of workshops and in regularly publishing the KGS Newsletters … TGS was organized, as a forum of cultural exchange, in April 1998, and has been engaged in organizing various talks and discussions and in publishing its own bi-monthly bulletin La Città Futura [from the title of a failed but renowned Gramscian publishing initiative in 1917] for the exchange of opinions and information on Gramsci […] Both of them have continued to carry out their study works, in maintaining relationship of exchange and cooperation between them. Thus I can tell you now that we are arriving at the stage of formally establishing an IGS-Japan ” (Hoara and Matsuda 2002, 136–137).
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Santoro, M., Gallelli, A., Gerli, M. (2020). Globalizing Gramsci: The Resuscitation of a Repressed Intellectual. In: Sapiro, G., Santoro, M., Baert, P. (eds) Ideas on the Move in the Social Sciences and Humanities. Socio-Historical Studies of the Social and Human Sciences. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-35024-6_8
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