Keywords: Hegemony, Passive Revolution, Economic Reductionism, war of maneuver and a war of position, Ethnicity, representation, fixed and not fixed identity, diversity
Gramsci’s Relevance for the Study of Race and Ethnicity
Stuart Hall’s (1986) essay aims to examine racism through the theoretical frameworks of Antonio Gramsci. Hall describes that Gramsci offers a view not rooted in traditional social science but instead a revision and theoretical framework more relevant to the immediate conditions of the 20th century. His contributions were concerted towards studying The Southern Question in the early 20th century and the presence of fascism leading to his arrest in 1929. Gramsci never directly analyzed the problems of race, ethnicity, or racism in their contemporary meaning; therefore, Hall poses that there is, however, a benefit to applying Gramsci’s contributions, e.g., hegemony, to understand the construction of racial/ethnic hierarchies, among other new developed understandings of racism.
In the essay's first section, Hall provides a brief overview of Gramsci in the historical context of the 20th century. He depicts Gramsci's circumstances, including the intellectual challenge of writing the prison notebooks within the broader scope of an Italian fascist regime. Hall acknowledges that, given its frequent fragmentation and historical specificity, Gramsci’s work can be challenging to engage with. He cautions against reading Gramsci's concepts at high levels of abstraction.
The second section of Hall’s essay entails the scholar heavily synthesizing a plethora of Gramcian concepts such as economic reductionism, popular beliefs as material forces, the particularity and historical specificity of hegemony, organic historical movements, the distinction between a war of maneuver and a war of position, common sense as not coherent - but as disjointed and fragmentary. The closing section provides ways in which Hall identifies how the Gramscian perspective could potentially be used to transform existing theories in analyzing racism through eight avenues.
I am interested in the academic co-opting of Gramscian ideas/concepts versus their original intention for political action; what is the responsibility/stakes of citing the now hugely popular contributions of Gramsci given their historically specific background?
The Passive Revolution
Antonio Gramsci, here, is theorizing very much within the concrete, historical, and conjunctural singular epoch of Italian history. Gramsci aims to convey how the ruling class maintains power through coercion and consent. A passive revolution entails a rupture - and the eventual “transformation of social and political structures that transpires without substantial active engagement or revolutionary actions by the masses. It essentially signifies a revolution without significant participation from the masses.” (Panelo 2018)
From my understanding, Gramsci’s description of a passive revolution works to deconstruct the bourgeois class’ pursuit to establish hegemony. Gramsci shows how power/hegemony is capable of changing appearance first by building from Vincenzo Cuoco's depiction of the struggles of Italian revolutionaries during the Risorgimento/unification of Italy; the Italian Revolutionaries held resources but were not able to collectively organize the people of the state.
However, Gramsci articulates (p. 294) that the looming force of fascism/hegemony began to manifest differently after 1871 through a transition from a war on maneuver to a war on position. Gramsci provides the example on p. 297 of the Italian nationalist Mazzini not being able to grasp the limitations of hegemony obtained through “maneuver” techniques when, after a “successful five-day insurrection in Milan and the Austrian withdrawal … Mazzini arrived in Milan and failed to gain popular support for views.”
In closing, Gramsci emphasizes the importance of understanding historical struggles in historico-political terms instead of objective intellectual terms, as the first allows a subjective reality of a historical event. He uses the example of individuals attempting to recount the Risorgimento through intellectual versus historic-political terms as clairvoyant, as it underestimates the immediate conjuncture and power of hegemony of the moment.
How do we define a passive revolution in the current society? How do we apply “articulation” to Gramsci’s theorization that the Italian bourgeoisie pursued a “passive revolution” in response to the French Revolution?
Media example: https://www.foxnews.com/media/levin-trump-indictment-sign-passive-revolution-democrats
Abraham
New Ethnicities (1988)
Hall begins by differentiating “two phases of the same movement, which constantly overlap and interweave.” (442) The movement being black cultural politics.
First phase: “The black experience”:
Unifying
Singular
With this first the conditions were given “to transform the dominant regimes of representation.” (443) But as object of these practices, not subjects.
Who can represent the black experience?
Change the imagery to a “positive” sense of black.
Second phase: “This shift is best thought of in terms of a change from a struggle over the relations of representation to a politics of representation itself.” (444)
“This gives questions of culture and ideology, and the scenarios of representation… a formative… place in the constitution of social and political life.” (444)
The end of black innocence: diversity
How can we conceive a politics, of representation, that includes all this diversity without leaving someone behind, hidden: War of position.
“The play of identity and difference which constructs racism is powered not only by the positioning of blacks as the inferior species but also, and at the same time, by an inexpressible envy and desire.” (445-446)
Racism as binary opposites: belonging, otherness.
Talking about the epistemic violence in racism, he reminds us of Fanon: “the internalization of the self-as-other.” (446)
The diversity of the representation of the black experience crosses a lot of borders, it is not just about the color of the skin.
Ethnicity; decolonize the term:
“a recognition that we all speak from a particular place, out of a particular history, out of a particular experience, a particular culture, without being contained by that position as “ethnic artists” or film-makers.” (448)
Questions:
The idea of diversity on “the black experience” and how it is changing in terms of representation could give Hall the entrance to talk about some other ideas ok blackness. If he talks about Fanon, why doesn’t he talk about Césaire or Glissant, who had come, on their own reality and space, with their own ideas of what being black means, and in a diverse sense, just like Hall is proposing. Is Hall’s own positioning limiting his ideas?
Media example:
Paintings by Kehinde Wiley: https://kehindewiley.com/selected-works/gallery/
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