Abstract
The three books I will review in this essay constitute important contributions and new directions in Gramscian studies available in the English language. I say “in the English language” to highlight the fact that two of these works (Coutinho’s and Santucci’s) are quality translations from the original Brazilian Portuguese and Italian, respectively. These two books are also works by authors widely considered to be their countries’ most important Gramscian scholars.
Though Coutinho’s and Santucci’s books are general introductions of Gramsci’s ideas, the Santucci text would probably be the best choice for an initial introduction to Gramsci’s ideas. Beyond an introduction to central Gramscian concepts, the Santucci text also provides a biographical chronology of Gramsci’s life and biographies of major political figures associated with Gramsci and his writings. I think adult educators will find both Coutinho’s and Santucci’s focus on Gramsci’s analysis of culture the most immediately relevant. Both authors highlight how Gramsci held a broad understanding of culture. If adult educators think social pedagogy (see Schugurensky, 2014, Turner Martí, 2014) when considering Gramsci’s analysis of culture, they will more accurately reflect Gramsci’s use of the term culture to discuss the overall formation of individuals in a given society.
The third book, The Postcolonial Gramsci, brings together a diverse collection of writings centering on the relevance and importance of Gramsci’s ideas for postcolonial and, specifically, South Asia’s Subaltern Studies scholarship. Even more so than with Coutinho, I think adult educators can take away from this text the international application of Gramsci’s ideas for people around the world. The notion of Gramsci as overly Eurocentric and, therefore, only relevant for “Western” contexts is put to rest by this collection of writings from around the world and particularly in postcolonial Asian contexts. In a number of chapters in Postcolonial Gramsci, culture, unlike with Coutinho and Santucci, is considered more in terms of arts and religion. I think adult educators interested in the intersections of our field with popular culture, consumption, and spirituality will find a number of new theoretical frameworks in the Postcolonial Gramsci that could inform new avenues of research.
In this review, I will discuss each book individually while also highlighting affinities across the texts. In my individual reviews, I will focus on aspects of each text I consider to be of most interest and relevance for adult educators. I will finish the review with a brief evaluation of the texts.
Santucci begins by identifying the role of intellectuals and the organization of culture as Gramsci’s leitmotif. This is fortunate for adult educators because this immediately highlights the implicitly, and often explicitly, pedagogical nature of Gramsci’s theory and practice. Culture is, for Gramsci, a highly political and pedagogical process.
The second, and longest, chapter of the Santucci text presents a very good mix of political biography and analysis of the development of Gramsci’s journalistic writings and political practice. Santucci makes frequent mention of the nonformal education organizations that Gramsci founded in the Italian Socialist Party (1913-1920) and the Italian Communist Party (1921-1926). In fact, Santucci argues that in Gramsci’s active (preincarceration) political years (1910-1926) he set himself three main interrelated tasks: (1) workers’ democracy, (2) education, and (3) communist propaganda.
Santucci makes the important point that Gramsci’s perspective of education evolved as he became more directly immersed in the increasingly radicalizing practice of workers and peasants in the Italian Socialist Party, and particularly in and after the biennio rosso (red biennium) years of 1919 and 1920. Gramsci’s initial educational work tended to be of and informed by enlightenment idealism; in other words, abstract but important ideas and concepts could inform workers and their struggles. Increasing direct involvement in factory occupations and other radical practice led Gramsci to consider learning and culture as theoretical understanding of political aims arising from the actual political practice of poor and working-class people.
Chapter 4 of the text is a very short introduction to the Prison Notebooks. At half the length of Chapter 2 on Gramsci’s preprison years, Santucci is only able to provide a rather sketchy discussion of major themes such as ideology, philosophy of praxis, hegemony, the party, historic bloc, and intellectuals. To the benefit of adult educators, culture is again a central theme of this chapter.
Coutinho’s Gramsci’s Political Thought is a more challenging, yet more thorough introduction to Gramsci’s ideas than the Santucci text. The main body of the book consists of seven chapters that constitute the English translation of the original Portuguese text published in Brazil in 1999. This English translation of the book includes three additional essays by Coutinho, which are presented as three appendixes. Throughout the text, Coutinho emphasizes that Gramsci’s starting point for his theory and practice was always politics and this included his pedagogical theory and practice.
The first three chapters of Coutinho’s text are similar to Santucci’s text in that they provide a chronologically organized analysis of the development of Gramsci’s theory and practice during his preprison years. A unique contribution of Coutinho is his consistent engagement in a discussion of Gramsci’s theory and practice in relation to that of Marx and more so that of Lenin. Coutinho makes the point that Gramsci could advance and go beyond Lenin only because he was a Leninist; that is to say, we can understand how Gramsci made fundamental advances in Marxism only by appropriately considering Gramsci’s close affiliation with the theory and practice of Lenin.
In Chapter 1, Coutinho describes Gramsci’s theory and practice during his university years and his work in the Italian Socialist Party up to 1918. For Coutinho, Gramsci’s early introduction to idealist philosophy in the university helped him overcome the positivism and determinism in socialist theory and practice prevalent in the Italian and European socialist movement of the pre–World War I period. Idealist philosophy also pushed Gramsci to emphasize the role of subjective conditions and, therefore, the pedagogical aspect of struggle. Coutinho concurs with Santucci that Gramsci’s early idealism made his pedagogy overly reliant on the introduction of ideas and concepts on the margins of the day-to-day struggles of poor and working-class people.
Coutinho highlights the positive influence of Lenin and the Soviet revolutionary experience on Gramsci in Chapter 2. Coutinho argues that Gramsci’s work in the Turin-based newspaper L’Ordine Nuovo (The New Order) was a continuation of his emphasis on education but with the new twist of education and action based squarely in the concrete practice of creating Soviet-type organizations with the factory councils emerging in Turin, Italy.
Chapters 4 through 7 focus on Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks. In these four chapters there are a number of themes of direct relevance for adult educators. Coutinho highlights the importance of Gramsci’s use of the term catharsis. In Coutinho’s words, catharsis is “when a class, thanks to the creation of a collective will, stops being a mere economic phenomenon, instead becoming a self-conscious subject of history” (p. 56). Catharsis in the Gramscian sense is a social pedagogical process and the work of a political party. It is both the individual and collective realization of the political nature of social and economic issues facing people.
In Chapter 4, Coutinho engages in a comparison of Habermas and Gramsci on their respective views on knowledge and human praxis, which should be of interest to adult educators who find inspiration and utility in the work of Habermas. Coutinho expands on his Gramscian engagement of Habermas in Appendix 1 where he also engages with the ideas of Hegel and Rousseau on democracy.
Another key adult education concept which Coutinho covers is civil society. Chapter 5 is dedicated to placing Gramsci’s analysis of civil society within what Coutinho considers to be one of Gramsci’s major contributions to political theory, namely, his concept of the Integral State. For Gramsci, unlike many adult education usages, civil society constitutes a major realm of the integral state along with political society. Civil society is a major factor in distinguishing societies of what Gramsci calls the East and West but thought of not geographically but historically and in terms of sociopolitical economic development. The advanced capitalist states are distinguished by a much more developed civil society component of the state. For Gramsci, civil society is the realm of private organizations, but by private Gramsci means not nonstate but rather organizations to which people voluntarily join or adhere. Political society constitutes the realm of organizations we commonly think of as state such as the branches of government, the military, the judiciary, and other directly coercive institutions. Coutinho says that Gramsci saw the development of civil societies in the West and the need for a war of position or battle over hegemony as reasons why the Russian revolutionary war of maneuver could not be successful in countries with developed civil societies.
In Chapter 8 and in the three appendixes, Coutinho makes convincing arguments and demonstrations of Gramsci’s relevance for the contemporary world and in particular to Latin America and the Brazilian context. Coutinho maintains that Gramsci’s relevancy lies in the fact that we continue to live in the sociopolitical economic arrangements that Gramsci analyzed while still in their nascent forms.
The Postcolonial Gramsci, edited by Neelam Srivastava and Baidik Bhattacharya, is distinct from the Coutinho and Santucci texts in that its goal is not to provide an introductory summary of Gramsci’s ideas but rather through a collection of essays to demonstrate the significant and broad impact of Gramsci’s ideas in postcolonial studies. As Santucci focuses on culture and Coutinho on politics as major themes in Gramsci, subalternity is the major Gramscian theme through which Srivastava and Bhattacharya argue that postcolonial studies have expanded on Gramsci’s intersectional analysis of nation, class, and race. Readers not familiar with postcolonial studies and subaltern studies may want to begin with Bhattacharya’s brief summary of them on pages 83 and 84. A number of contributors discuss the idea that Gramsci himself was a postcolonial thinker due to his southern Italy, Sardinian roots, and his emphasis on the central role of southern Italian peasants in the struggle for socialism in Italy. Gramsci’s southern orientation is most obviously evident in his last preprison, unfinished essay of 1926 titled “Some Aspects of the Southern Question,” which the contributors to The Postcolonial Gramsci consider a major early contribution to postcolonial studies.
Since The Postcolonial Gramsci is an edited collection, I will highlight the contributions and themes I think are of most relevance for adult educators. In the introductory chapter, Srivastava and Bhattacharya highlight two Gramsci concepts with direct pedagogical implications. First, Gramsci’s analysis of the north and south divisions in Italy as a colonial question and his extension of this analysis to Italy’s militarism toward Africa and European colonialism more generally help us understand how only through anticolonial struggle can people learn to be politically independent of the dominant classes. For Gramsci, the absorption of the culture of the colonizer is not a form of liberation but an extension of the colonial relation. Moreover, the colonial relation in Europe misdirects the European subaltern classes from addressing their own oppressors. In the U.S. context, one can immediately make links here between Gramsci and Woodson’s (2000) classic conceptualization of miseducation. Young, in his chapter, extends this pedagogical discussion of Gramsci’s work by arguing along the lines of Santucci that culture was a central element in Gramsci. For Young, the main objective of Gramsci’s prison notebooks was to address the cultural challenges he outlined in his 1926 unfinished essay on the Southern Question. Specifically, how can the subaltern groups of Italian workers and peasants develop their own cultural hegemony independent of the dominant group? Central to this task is the long-term educational work of and through independent subaltern organizations that step by step gain ground in a war of position in civil society.
The centrality of cultural work, or pedagogical work for adult educators, is also at the heart of Srivastava’s contribution comparing George Padmore and Frantz Fanon using Gramsci’s concept of organic intellectual. Moreover, by highlighting the affinities of Padmore and Fanon to Gramsci, Srivastava adds credence to the notion of Gramsci as a postcolonial thinker. Srivastava argues that Gramsci’s concept of hegemony emphasizes the central role of culture in anticolonial political struggle and in the makeup of a colonized society. So we can think about this as the educational role of and within anticolonial social movements and the miseducation of colonialism in maintaining the colonial relationship.
In The Postcolonial Gramsci, the growing body of adult education scholars interested in the areas of spirituality, popular culture, consumption, and fiction can find innovative applications of Gramsci that could inform future research. Ian Chamber’s contribution on religion, secularism, and hegemony provides a provocative analysis of the counterintuitive and pedagogical role of Christianity’s hegemony in creating the “modern” secular West. Cheah’s contribution on the Chinese filmmaker Jia Zhangke and Rajan’s contribution on two Indian novels show the utility of Gramsci’s concept of organic intellectual for studies on the popular cultural industry as a whole and for the analysis of popular cultural artifacts themselves.
I highly recommend any and all of these texts for adult educators even though none of them were written by education scholars. Anyone reading these texts from a pedagogical standpoint can find ample application to research and practice in adult education and particularly adult education oriented toward the goal of social justice. Santucci’s text is the most accessible, and the biographical appendices add to its utility as an introductory text to Gramsci. Coutinho’s book is also introductory, yet more complete and probably better suited for readers with at least a cursory understanding of Gramsci and Gramscian concepts. The Postcolonial Gramsci provides both relevant and innovative applications of Gramscian concepts to themes common in adult education scholarship while also providing compelling evidence of the universality of Gramsci. At the very end of their introduction to The Postcolonial Gramsci, Srivastava and Bhattacharya make a very telling comment on the state of Gramscian studies in relation to adult education. While justifying the fact that their collection is in no way exhaustive of all the themes that could be covered in terms of Gramsci and postcolonialism, they mention education and gender as “both fertile areas of future enquiry” (p. 13). This is both fortunate and unfortunate. Similar to Santucci and Coutinho, and to most Gramscian scholars for that matter, Srivastava, Bhattacharya, and their contributors address a number of pedagogical themes in Gramsci without ever referencing adult education or education scholarship on Gramsci. This lack of dialogue across disciplines, which reflects the absence of our Gramscian scholarship in the larger area of Gramscian studies, nevertheless, provides further confirmation of the relevancy of Gramsci for an adult education pedagogy of social justice.