Antonio Gramsci is widely celebrated as the most original political thinker in Western Marxism. Among the most central aspects of his enduring intellectual legacy is the concept of subalternity. Developed in the work of scholars such as Gayatri Spivak and Ranajit Guha, subalternity has been extraordinarily influential across fields of inquiry stretching from cultural studies, literary theory, and postcolonial criticism to anthropology, sociology, criminology, and disability studies. Almost every author whose work touches upon subalterns alludes to Gramsci’s formulation of the concept. Yet Gramsci’s original writings on the topic have not yet appeared in full in English. Among his prison notebooks, Gramsci devoted a single notebook to the theme of subaltern social groups. Notebook 25, which he entitled “On the Margins of History (History of Subaltern Social Groups),” contains a series of observations on subaltern groups from ancient Rome and medieval communes to the period after the Italian Risorgimento, in addition to discussions of the state, intellectuals, the methodological criteria of historical analysis, and reflections on utopias and philosophical novels. This volume presents the first complete translation of Gramsci’s notes on the topic. In addition to a comprehensive translation of Notebook 25 along with Gramsci’s first draft and related notes on subaltern groups, it includes a critical apparatus that clarifies Gramsci’s history, culture, and sources and contextualizes these ideas against his earlier writings and letters. Subaltern Social Groups is an indispensable account of the development of one of the crucial concepts in twentieth-century thought.

This volume presents the first complete translation of Antonio Gramsci's notes on the concept of subalternity, including the prison notebook devoted to the theme of subaltern social groups. It includes a critical apparatus that clarifies Gramsci's history, culture, and sources and contextualizes these ideas against his earlier writings and letters.

The articles in this collection provide an alternative view of Middle Eastern history by focusing on the oppressed and the excluded, offering a challenge to the usual elite narratives. The collection is unique in its historical depth - ranging from the medieval period to the present - and its geographical reach, including Iran, the Ottoman Empire/Turkey, the Balkans, the Arab Middle East and North Africa. The first to focus on the oppressed and the excluded, and their differing strategies of survival, of negotiation, and of protest and resistance, the book covers: both major social classes and sectors the working class the peasantry the urban poor women marginal groups such as gypsies and slaves Based on perspectives drawn from the work of the great European social historians, and particularly inspired by Antonio Gramsci, the collection seeks to restore a sense of historical agency to subaltern classes in the region, and to uncover ‘the politics of the people’.

This edited volume provides a coherent and comprehensive assessment of Antonio Gramsci's significant contribution to the fields of political and cultural theory. It contains seminal contributions from a broad range of important political and cultural theorists from around the world and explains the origins, development and context for Gramsci's thought as well as analysing his continued relevance and influence to contemporary debates. It demonstrates the multidisciplinary nature of Gramscian thought to produce new insights into the intersection of economic, political, cultural, and social processes, and to create a vital resource for readers across the disciplines of political theory, cultural studies, political economy, philosophy, and subaltern studies.

Inspired by Antonio Gramsci’s writings on the history of subaltern classes, the authors in Mapping Subaltern Studies and the Postcolonial sought to contest the elite histories of Indian nationalists by adopting the paradigm of ‘history from below’. Later on, the project shifted from its social history origins by drawing upon an eclectic group of thinkers that included Edward Said, Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida. This book provides a comprehensive balance sheet of the project and its developments, including Ranajit Guha’s original subaltern studies manifesto, Partha Chatterjee, Dipesh Chakrabarty and Gayatri Spivak.

Sharing a postrevolutionary sympathy with the struggles of the poor, the contributors to this first comprehensive collection of writing on subalternity in Latin America work to actively link politics, culture, and literature. Emerging from a decade of work and debates generated by a collective known as the Latin American Studies Group, the volume privileges the category of the subaltern over that of class, as contributors focus on the possibilities of investigating history from below. In addition to an overview by Ranajit Guha, essay topics include nineteenth-century hygiene in Latin American countries, Rigoberta Menchú after the Nobel, commentaries on Haitian and Argentinian issues, the relationship between gender and race in Bolivia, and ungovernability and tragedy in Peru. Providing a radical critique of elite culture and of liberal, bourgeois, and modern epistemologies and projects, the essays included here prove that Latin American Subaltern Studies is much more than the mere translation of subaltern studies from South Asia to Latin America. Contributors. Marcelo Bergman, John Beverley, Robert Carr, Sara Castro-Klarén, Michael Clark, Beatriz González Stephan, Ranajit Guha, María Milagros López , Walter Mignolo, Alberto Moreiras, Abdul-Karim Mustapha, José Rabasa, Ileana Rodríguez, Josefina Saldaña-Portillo, Javier Sanjinés, C. Patricia Seed, Doris Sommer, Marcia Stephenson, Mónica Szurmuk, Gareth Williams, Marc Zimmerman

What is colonialism and what is a colonial state? Ranajit Guha points out that the colonial state in South Asia was fundamentally different from the metropolitan bourgeois state which sired it. The metropolitan state was hegemonic in character, and its claim to dominance was based on a power relation in which persuasion outweighed coercion. Conversely, the colonial state was non-hegemonic, and in its structure of dominance coercion was paramount. Indeed, the originality of the South Asian colonial state lay precisely in this difference: a historical paradox, it was an autocracy set up and sustained in the East by the foremost democracy of the Western world. It was not possible for that non-hegemonic state to assimilate the civil society of the colonized to itself. Thus the colonial state, as Guha defines it in this closely argued work, was a paradox--a dominance without hegemony. Dominance without Hegemony had a nationalist aspect as well. This arose from a structural split between the elite and subaltern domains of politics, and the consequent failure of the Indian bourgeoisie to integrate vast areas of the life and consciousness of the people into an alternative hegemony. That predicament is discussed in terms of the nationalist project of anticipating power by mobilizing the masses and producing an alternative historiography. In both endeavors the elite claimed to speak for the people constituted as a nation and sought to challenge the pretensions of an alien regime to represent the colonized. A rivalry between an aspirant to power and its incumbent, this was in essence a contest for hegemony.