Abstract
The collapse of the Soviet Union, the failure of Third World nationalism, the ascendancy of contemporary neoliberalism and the growth of right-ofcentre opposition movements have served in recent times to underline multiple criticisms of naïve or romanticized notions of resistance. Emancipatory nationalism can be seen as a derivative, essentialist discourse; socialism as Eurocentric, authoritarian and economistic; liberalism as imperial, disciplinary or both.1 In the ruins of a once-defiant resistance studies, scholars have built up an ever more elaborate conceptual framework for understanding the subtle workings of an apparently all-conquering capitalist modernity. Eclipsing former notions of authentic resistance, we have the concept of hegemony, which transforms what once appeared as resistance and agency into the activation of incorporated subjects, who, through their own activity of self-formation, including ostensible ‘resistance’, work largely unwittingly to sustain the ruling order.2 In the light of this considerable body of scholarship, outright assault on the established order appears as the preservation of hegemonic structures with new content. The contestation and manipulation of dominant terms by subalterns can be seen as consolidating the legitimacy of these terms. Inversion, parody and counterculture can be seen as ritualized satisfactions permitted only in authorized spaces.
We have … to add to the concept of hegemony the concepts of counter-hegemony and alternative hegemony, which are real and persistent elements of practice.
Raymond Williams
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Notes
Respectively, Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse ( Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986 )
Joseph A. Massad, Colonial Effects: The Making of National Identity in Jordan (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001 )
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Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, first published 1975, translated by Alan Sheridan ( New York: Vintage Books, 1979 )
Edward W. Said, Orientalism ( London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978 )
Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988 ).
Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, edited and translated by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith ( London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1971 )
Perry Anderson, ‘The Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci’, in New Left Review, 100 (1976–7), pp. 5–78; Foucault, Discipline and Punish;
Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, first published 1972 ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977 )
Chantal Mouffe, ‘Hegemony and Ideology in Gramsci’, in Gramsci and Marxist Theory, Chantal Mouffe ed. ( London, Boston and Henley: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979 ), pp. 168–203
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Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature ( Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1977 ), p. 114.
Cited in Walter L. Adamson, ‘Beyond “Reform or Revolution”: Notes on Political Education in Gramsci, Habermas and Arendt’, in Theory and Society, Vol. 6, No. 3 (November 1978), pp. 429–60, esp. 431. Power here is communicative, involving a dialogue towards concerted decision. As Adamson writes on p. 431, ‘Proletarian revolution is the establishment of this sort of power, not a dictatorship of the proletariat, but an ascending “historical bloc” becoming a state’
As Michèle Barrett puts it in ‘Ideology, Politics, Hegemony: From Gramsci to Laclau and Mouffe’, in Mapping Ideology, edited by Slavoj Zizek (London: Verso, 1994), pp. 235–64, esp. 238.
Nadia Urbinati, ‘From the Periphery of Modernity: Antonio Gramsci’s Theory of Subordination and Hegemony’, in Political Theory, Vol. 26, No. 3 (June 1998), pp. 370–391, esp. 370. Urbinati here refers to hegemony, but the form of counterhegemony as a strategy to forge a new hegemony involves the same principle.
For a useful overview, see Anne Showstack Sassoon, Gramsci’s Politics, first published 1980, 2nd edn ( London: Hutchinson, 1987 ).
For a useful overview of the changing shape of Subaltern Studies from the 1970s to the late 1990s, see Vinayak Chaturvedi ed., Mapping Subaltern Studies and the Postcolonial ( London: Verso, 2000 ).
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William I. Robinson, Transnational Conflicts: Central America, Social Change, and Globalization ( London: Verso, 2003 ).
Plotke, Social Movements, 1995, p. 135. See also David Plotke, ‘What’s So New About New Social Movements?’, Socialist Review 20, 1 (1990), pp. 81–102.
See Dipesh Chakarbarty’s extensive criticism of what he calls ‘historicism’, in Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), pp. 6–16.
Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. For an excellent discussion, see William Sewell, ‘Towards a Post-materialist Rhetoric for Labor History’, in Rethinking Labor History: Essays on Discourse and Class Analysis, edited by Lenard R. Bernstein ( Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993 ).
Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings,1972–1977 ( New York: Random House, 1980 ).
Timothy Mitchell, ‘Everyday Metaphors of Power’, in Theory and Society, Vol. 19, No. 5 (October 1990), pp. 545–77, esp. 552.
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See also E. San Juan, Hegemony and Strategies of Transgression: Essays in Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1995 ).
George Lipsitz, ‘The Struggle for Hegemony’, in The Journal of American History, Vol. 75, No. 1 (June 1988), pp. 146–50, esp. 146–7. Having said this, of course, the peasantry in Gramsci were indeed in a position of having the hegemony of a fundamental class imposed upon them from above.
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire ( Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000 )
for a useful critique see Gopal Balakrishnan ed., Debating Empire (London: Verso, 2003). The phrase ‘waiting room of history’, comes from Dipesh Chakrabarty’s critique of historicism in Provincializing Europe, p. 8.
Michael Mann, The Sources of Social Power, Volume 1, A History of Power from the Beginning to A.D.1760 ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986 ), pp. 1–34.
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Chalcraft, J., Noorani, Y. (2007). Introduction. In: Chalcraft, J., Noorani, Y. (eds) Counterhegemony in the Colony and Postcolony. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230592162_1
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