The Postcolonial Gramsci

The importance of Antonio Gramsci’s work for postcolonial studies can hardly be exaggerated, and in this volume, contributors situate Gramsci's work in the vast and complex oeuvre of postcolonial studies. Specifically, this book endeavors to reassess the impact on postcolonial studies of the central role assigned by Gramsci to culture and literature in the formation of a truly revolutionary idea of the national―a notion that has profoundly shaped the thinking of both Frantz Fanon and Edward Said. Gramsci, as Iain Chambers has argued, has been instrumental in helping scholars rethink their understanding of historical, political, and cultural struggle by substituting the relationship between tradition and modernity with that of subaltern versus hegemonic parts of the world. Combining theoretical reflections and re-interpretations of Gramsci, the scholars in this collection present comparative geo-cultural perspectives on the meaning of the subaltern, passive revolution, hegemony, and the concept of national-popular culture in order to chart out a political map of the postcolonial through the central focus on Gramsci.

Neelam Srivastava is Senior Lecturer in Postcolonial Literature at Newcastle University (UK). She is the author of Secularism in the Postcolonial Indian Novel: National and Cosmopolitan Narratives in English (Routledge, 2007). She has published essays on South Asian literature in English, the film-maker Gillo Pontecorvo, and the cultural history of Italian colonialism. She is currently the coordinator of an International Research Network, "Postcolonial Translation: The Case of South Asia", funded by the Leverhulme Trust.

Baidik Bhattacharya is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Delhi, India. His essays on colonial and postcolonial theory and literature have appeared in journals like Postcolonial Studies, Novel, and Interventions. He is currently completing a book manuscript tentatively titled Postcolonial Writing in the Era of Globalization.