Visiting Scholar Mauro Pala edited and translated a collection of English works on Antonio Gramsci into Italian for publication. Please join us at a reception to celebrate the launch of Americanismi. Sulla ricezione del pensiero di Antonio Gramsci negli USA (Americanisms: about the reception of Gramsci’s thought in the USA) published by Cooperativa Universitaria Editrice Cagliaritana in 2010.
Antonio Gramsci’s Selection of Prison Notebooks (published in 1971) influenced least two generations of American intellectuals and theorists as a means for rethinking the politics and culture of the left and especially the role of hegemony in politics. Gramsci’s writings were also a critical reservoir for developing strategies and forging opposition during and immediately following the end of the Cold War. Gramsci’s analysis of the tendencies of capitalism to rejuvenate itself through innovation and restructuring class relations were validated by the prevailing trends in a world emancipated from divisions between a western and an eastern bloc. In fact, his writings on the Southern Question already in the 1920s prefigured, as Edward Said observed, a new world order revolving around a north/south axis. “Americanismi. Sulla ricezione del pensiero di Gramsci negli USA” is a collection of essays whose contributors, following Joseph Buttigieg’s intuition of the “inseparability of language and culture”, thoroughly examine how the Italian intellectual’s work has become widely disseminated throughout the US and in the US academia in the 1990s and the last decade, giving form to a cultural analysis alert to the complexities of modernity and modernization and to the political processes that produce—or, to use Chomsky’s term, ‘manufacture’—the consent that legitimizes existing liberal democracies.