Kipfer Mallick 22 Gramsci Fanon: Stretch, Translate

Historical Materialism (2022) 1–37
brill.com/hima
‘Stretch’ and ‘Translate’: Gramscian Lineages,

Fanonist Convergences in the (Post)Colony
Stefan A. Kipfer | ORCID: 0000-0003-2919-2758

Associate Professor, Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change,
York University, Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Corresponding author
kipfer@yorku.ca
Ayyaz Mallick | orcid: 0000-0002-8412-8604

Lecturer, Department of Geography and Planning, University of Liverpool,
Liverpool, UK
M.A.Mallick@liverpool.ac.uk
Abstract
This paper establishes a theoretical linkage between Antonio Gramsci and Frantz
Fanon. Gramsci’s critical-historicist method and its relationship to humanism, his
integral understanding of Marxism, and emphasis on the moment of political practice
resonate with Fanon’s articulation of the subjective and political-economic aspects of
the colonial question, his activistic materialism, and his dialectically humanist uni-
versalism forged through anti-colonial struggle. Establishing this linkage presupposes
engaging distinct currents of postcolonial Gramscianism in relation to each other
and to the philological turn in Gramsci scholarship. In turn, a Gramsci–Fanon con-
vergence helps elucidate the specificities of (post-)colonial contexts without elevating
these into a civilisational-ontological difference. Emphasising their geographical sen-
sitivity as a meeting point, pushing Gramsci towards Fanon helps us treat the global
South and imperial heartlands relationally, in historico-geographical and specifically
political terms. A Fanonian Gramsci (or Gramscian Fanon) thus allows us to tackle
Eurocentrism without closing doors to a counter- or postcolonial Marxism.
Keywords
Antonio Gramsci – Frantz Fanon – critical historicism – humanism – relational

comparison – Marxism – anti-colonialism
© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2022 | doi:10.1163/1569206X-20222142

2 Kipfer and Mallick
There is no established consensus on appropriating the work of Antonio

Gramsci.1 Where multiple post- or decolonial Gramscis have emerged in
(post-)colonial contexts, others have sought to confine the Sardinian to the
lineages (and closures) of ‘Western Marxism’. In contradistinction to such
geographical and intellectual sequestrations (to be reviewed in more detail
later), this paper establishes a theoretical linkage between Antonio Gramsci
and Frantz Fanon through a concerted focus on their methodological and epis-
temological convergences. The latter, in turn, are strongly linked to the two
revolutionaries’ dialectically humanist universalism and their commitment to
understanding and, ultimately, overcoming subalternity through integral and
collective forms of transformation. Their profoundly geographical sensibility –
an elucidation of the social construction and active role of spatial rhythms –
along with their calls to ‘translate’ and ‘stretch’ Marxism, form the lynchpin of
a method that treats subaltern social groups, the global South, and the imperial
heartlands relationally, i.e. in historico-geographical and specifically political
terms. The specificities of subaltern groups and (post-)colonial contexts are
thus elucidated through their many historico-geographical mediations instead
of reducing these to civilisational-ontological or geo-cultural difference (tradi-
tion/modernity, or West/East).
Linking Gramsci to Fanon in such a manner presupposes working through
distinct lineages of Gramscian engagement in the global South. Here, we
engage with postcolonial Gramscianisms, especially those emerging in South
Asia, while connecting these to the more contemporary philological turn in
Gramsci scholarship. Such delineation allows us to clarify the methodologi-
cal (and political) stakes of Gramsci’s ‘travels’ and ‘translations’, while build-
ing a more durable basis for the convergence we develop between Gramsci
and Fanon, one pertinent for counter-colonial and anti-imperial concerns.
Ultimately, we arrive at a Fanonian Gramsci (or Gramscian Fanon) who allows
us to avoid Eurocentrism while opening towards a counter- or postcolonial
Marxism.
That Gramsci’s works corrode the distinction between classical and inter-/
post-war European, Western Marxism is now well-established. As pointed out
by (amongst others) Craig Brandist, it is also impossible to confine Gramsci to
a ‘West’ preoccupied with matters of culture and civil society (with the Soviet
East presumably more attuned to political economy and political society).
Indeed, Gramsci developed crucial concepts, including ‘hegemony’ and the
‘national-popular’, in part through ‘Eastern’ debates he encountered while in
1 Authors’ note: Sections of this paper have been developed from Kipfer 2018.
10.1163/1569206X-20222142 | Historical Materialism ( 2022) 1–37

‘ Stretch ’ and ‘ Translate ’ 3
the Soviet Union.2 There the distinction between East and West also referred
to the relationship between Russian and Central Asian parts of the former
Russian empire and concomitant debates about national self-determination.3
Into the 1930s, debates about Soviet hegemony were as much concerned with
language and subaltern culture as they were with political strategy and eco-
nomic development.
Gramsci’s indebtedness to Southern and Western European intellectual
life does not render his work irrelevant elsewhere. Insights from Gramsci
and strongly resonant but parallel ideas have been developed in various
non-European contexts – from Latin America and the Caribbean to South Asia
and South Africa already in the 1920s (by José Carlos Mariátegui) and then more
forcefully from the 1950s to the 1980s (for example by Carlos Nelson Coutinho,
Héctor Agosti, José Maria Aricó, Juan Carlos Portantiero, Asok Sen, Susobhan
Sarkar, Ernesto Laclau and Stuart Hall). Gramsci’s uses for analyses of colo-
nialism, imperialism and racism are similarly no secret. In the Anglophone
world, intellectuals have long mobilised Gramsci for counter-colonial and
anti-imperial projects.4 Some have drawn inspiration from Gramsci’s foci:
the peasantry, city and country, Italy’s Southern question, linkages between
the national and the international, Italian imperialism, Gandhi and political
strategy. Others, including Stuart Hall, Himani Bannerji, Edward Said, and
Harry Harootunian have also been inspired by Gramsci’s method and political
engagement.
However , there is no agreement on how to approach Gramsci. As we can see
from two recent books, The Postcolonial Gramsci5 and The Political Philosophies
of Antonio Gramsci and B.R. Ambedkar,6 there are multiple counter-, post- or
decolonial Gramscis. While the second book links Ambedkar and Gramsci to
the philological turn in Gramscian scholarship, the first distances itself from
this turn to focus on Edward Said’s work and the subaltern studies collective.
Closer to the Zene volume, our paper expands on Gramscian engagements in
the global South, and, in particular, South Asia, by bringing into focus other
historicist mobilisations of the Sardinian that were also in tune with ques-
tions of political strategy. This will allow us to prepare the ground upon which
to link Gramsci to anti-colonial and anti-capitalist thinkers in the global
South such as Frantz Fanon. Indeed, the latter’s contributions to Panafrican
2 See also Frosini 2018, pp. 210–11.

3 See also Renault 2017.
4 Hall 1988, 1996a; Kiernan 1995; Ahmad 1996a; Bannerji 2001a; Brennan 2006; Srivastava and
Bhattacharya 2012; Salem 2020.
5 Srivastava and Bhattacharya 2012.
6 Zene (ed.) 2013.
Historical Materialism ( 2022) 1–37 | 10.1163/1569206X-20222142

and tricontinental liberation connect to debates that were formative for

Gramsci too: those over national self-determination in the early Communist
International.
We pick up on earlier work,7 some in association with Gillian Hart,8 to con-
centrate on three translations of Gramsci. The first, subaltern studies, initially
pursued Gramscian questions but ended up in a philosophical anti-historicism
gravitating around civilisational categories. The second approach is the phil-
ological turn in Gramsci scholarship, which has also emphasised Gramsci’s
peculiarly historicist method. This second approach was preceded by still other
readings of Gramsci in the South, notably South Asia. Through careful atten-
tion to Gramsci’s situated and relational development of concepts and their
links to political strategy, these mobilisations prefigured the philological turn.
While others have pointed this out with reference to Latin America,9 China,10
and the Arabic-speaking world,11 we make reference to the contributions of
Aijaz Ahmad and Himani Bannerji. We suggest that these latter readings serve
as a mediatory moment between the Subalternists and the critical historicism
of the philological turn.
Moving beyond the Subalternist/anti-historicist deployments, the philolog-
ical as well as strategic register of Gramsci will help in elaborating the the-
oretical and political conditions of possibility for connecting Gramsci with
other anti-colonial thinkers, especially Frantz Fanon. This paper thus radi-
ates from Gramsci to meet Fanon (and thus to push beyond Gramsci). Here,
Gramsci’s spatially inflected historicist method and its relationship to human-
ism, his integral understanding of Marxism, and his emphasis on the moment
of political practice resonates with Fanon’s ambition to articulate the sub-
jective and political-economic aspects of the colonial question, his activistic
historical-geographical materialism, and his call to forge a dialectically humanist
‘partisan universalism’ from the crucible of anti-colonial struggle. We high-
light that Gramsci’s reflections on racism and comparative civilisations were
crucial for the development of his method. Thus, linking Gramsci to Fanon
provides an alternative to those approaches that think the world in terms of
civilisational or geocultural categories (tradition/modernity, or West/East). It
provides openings to sublate the abiding concern of Subalternist readings –
i.e. of thinking through the specificity of (post-)colonial contexts – without
7 Kipfer 2004, 2013, 2018; Mallick 2017, 2018.

8 Kipfer and Hart 2013; Hart 2013.
9 Coutinho 2013; Bosteels 2014; Hesketh 2019.
10 Caterina 2021; Wang 2020.
11 Manduchi 2020; Gherib 2021.

elevating these to the level of civilisational-ontological difference, thus allow-

ing us to tackle Eurocentrism without closing the door to counter- or postco-
lonial Marxisms.12
Historical geography constitutes a central terrain for the Gramsci–Fanon
convergence. Elsewhere, we have highlighted the importance of spatial con-
siderations for both thinkers’ elaborations and strategic conceptions of revolu-
tionary change. Specifically, we have argued that their respective geographical
understandings are multi-scalar and treat variously-named social spaces (‘city’,
‘country’, ‘nation’ etc.) in a relational, open-ended fashion.13 Consequently,
‘space’ is considered by both as a vital component, instead of as a counter-
point, to historical processes. These arguments also reverberate through this
article, ushering in the basic proposition that to historicise and spatialise, to
relate and compare is fundamental for both Gramsci and Fanon. This conver-
gence helps us comprehend the pertinence of Gramsci’s spatial historicism in
new ways, through what Ato Sekyi-Otu has called Fanon’s critical historicist
refusal to ontologise what is difficult not to ontologise: the racialised features
of an imperial world.14 Fanon proposed to do this by attending to the spatially
uneven and historically dynamic ways in which racism and (neo-)colonialism
permeate everyday life, national historical blocs and world order. In this pre-
cise sense we agree with Neelam Srivastava that Fanon has given Gramsci’s
understanding of subalternity a properly ‘planetary dimension’.15
1 A Gramsci for Post- and (Neo-)colonial Times?
In India, Ranajit Guha16 and Partha Chatterjee17 deployed Gramsci (among

others) to explore the agency of subaltern classes and the limited capaci-
ties of pre- and post-independence nationalism to find anchors in subaltern
domains. These classics of Subaltern Studies taught us much about the only
feebly hegemonic character of bourgeois rule in (post-)colonial situations.
Yet, they did so in partial contradistinction to Gramsci himself, for example
by making the strong claim that the subaltern (peasants, usually) move in
12 The door to such a counter-colonial Marxism is closed also by Marxist responses such as
Vivek Chibber’s critique of Subaltern Studies (Chibber 2013; also see Boggio Ewanjé-Epée
and Renault 2013; Hart 2018).
13 See footnote 8, and Kipfer 2011, 2021a; Mallick 2020b, 2021.
14 Sekyi-Otu 2021, pp. 242–3; Sekyi-Otu 2011, p. 48.
15 Srivastava 2017, p. 25.
16 Guha 1982, 1983.
17 Chatterjee 1986.

autonomous worlds, not in determinate relations to ruling circles.18 With the

postcolonial and post-Marxist turn in Subaltern Studies, most famously artic-
ulated by Gayatri Spivak, Gramsci receded further into the background.19 The
result of Spivak’s original (and then revised)20 move was to present a portrait
of the subaltern as a simultaneously unrepresentable, silent and excluded
counterpoint to modernity.21 Gramsci, however, treated subaltern groups in
a relational and processual manner, ‘their history … intertwined with that of
civil society, and thereby with the history of States, and groups of States’.22
Subaltern groups and classes are thus products of (self-) representation, with
a stubborn commitment to making their voices heard, even while ensconced
within the strategies of subordination through which integral states are built.23
What is clear is that the Subaltern project was always more than a reflection
on comparative difference. A broad range of authors (including Ajaz Ahmad,
Sumit Sarkar, Tanika Sarkar, Himani Bannerji, Vasant Kaiwar, Priyamvada
Gopal, and Manu Goswami) has pointed out the Subalternists’ one-sided,
non-dialectical habit of developing conceptual abstractions that are then
reimposed onto historical dynamics. Specifically, two interrelated dualisms
structure their theoretical oeuvres. First, they treat the relationship between
elites and subaltern groups more as a cleavage between incompatible worlds
and less as a dynamic relationship; this cleavage in turn was an indicator of
the unbridgeable differences between the political histories and philosophical
categories of India and those of Europe. Consequently, the Subalternists ended
up (variously) in conceptual dichotomies: ‘domination’ and ‘hegemony’,24 the
internal-spiritual versus external-material aspects of nationalism,25 civil soci-
ety and political society,26 and, finally, between bourgeois, rational, modern,
and subaltern, spiritual, religious spheres.27
In Chakrabarty’s Provincializing Europe, for example, the distinction between
European and Indian history becomes animated by a broader set of distinctions
and figures: between reason and experience, science and spirituality, Marx and
18 Zachariah 2020.
19 Green 2011.
20 Spivak 2014, 2012.
21 Thomas 2020a.
22 Gramsci Q25 §5 [Gramsci 1971, pp. 52].
23 Thomas 2020a.
24 Guha 1997, 2011.
25 Chatterjee 1993.
26 Chatterjee 2008.
27 Chakrabarty 2000, p. 11.

Heidegger.28 Here, Marxism belongs to ‘Europe’, as do reason, abstraction and

capital. Along with Rankean historiography, Hegelian philosophy, and mod-
ernisation theory, Marxism too is a Eurocentric historicism that burdens the
non-West with a Sisyphean pressure to catch-up.29 The tortured non-West must
thus decentre historical materialism with a differential and concrete notion
of History (History 2), which includes the history of ‘gods and spirits’, a funda-
mentally different temporality from the rational, abstract, linear, homogenous
and universal temporality of capital (History 1).30 In this stylised portrait of tra-
dition/modernity and East/West, Gramsci disappears while subaltern groups
become schematic reference points in philosophical exchange instead of liv-
ing and contradictory forces within really-existing historical dynamics.31 As
Zachariah has perceptively pointed out, this approach – initially predicated on
analogy and comparison – ‘paradoxically produced ways of thinking an Indian
exceptionalism’, ‘the route to a romanticised indigenism’ which missed the
figure of the fascist (a key Gramscian concern) lurking within the interstices
of an undialectical, non-relational, and culturally overdetermined compara-
tive approach.32 While some have proposed to rescue elements of History 2 by
reading Chakrabarty dialectically against himself,33 our point is to underline,
with formative help from (significantly Gramscian and, at times, Fanonian)
South Asian Marxists, just how far Provincializing Europe has taken the subal-
tern project from a Gramscian understanding of subalternity.
The recent Gramscian elucidation of Nasserist hegemony and its ambigu-
ous afterlives in Egypt by Sara Salem here deserves comment.34 Our project of
‘translating’ and ‘stretching’ Gramsci to the (post)colonial context bears much
affinity with Salem’s. However, where Salem reads Gramsci through Fanon and
Subaltern Studies – especially Guha’s early and Chatterjee’s later work – we
emphasise a different intellectual lineage for a Gramsci–Fanon convergence.
This alternative lineage of postcolonial (and South Asian) Gramsci-inspired
28 Mobilising Heidegger for historiographical purposes opposed to Eurocentrism is deeply

problematic because the reactionary currents focused in Heidegger are themselves con-
stitutive of Western philosophy, and because Heidegger’s corrosive jargon of authenticity
is not meant to generate social research but to take temporality proper out of real-existing
history.
29 Chakrabarty 2000, pp. 6–23, 237–55.
30 Chakrabarty 2000, pp. 49–113.
31 Sarkar 2000; Bannerji 2001b; Kaiwar 2013, pp. 152–80; Hart 2015.
32 Zachariah 2020, pp. 68, 79–80.
33 Chaudhary 2012.
34 Salem 2020.

scholarship, in its combination with the philological turn, avoids the unhelpful
theoretical dualisms that mar many Subalternist theorisations.35
Indeed, in the very India where Subaltern Studies was born, Gramsci has
also emerged in a very different register, deployed for situated, relational and
strategic readings of social formations in the global South. These approaches
often developed through a trenchant critique of subalternist texts. Parallel to
Latin American and South African interventions,36 a long-standing Indian
scholarship has mobilised Gramscian concepts to, for example, deline-
ate the post-Independence historical bloc37 and analyse local government
and subaltern common sense.38 Here, Aijaz Ahmad and Himani Bannerji’s
Marxist-Gramscian analyses of fascism and exclusivist national cultures are
notable.39 Both situate Gramsci’s concepts such as ‘national-popular’ and
‘common sense’ within the unevenly developed and weakly hegemonic real-
ities of post-Risorgimento Italy. Ahmad, for example, establishes explicit par-
allels between Latinised Catholic high culture in Italy and Sanskritised high
Brahminism in India.40 He connects the ‘cosmopolitanism’ of traditional intel-
lectuals to the uneven development of capitalism in India and Italy to provide
a powerful comparative diagnosis of Hindutva fascism.
Similarly, Bannerji elaborates on Gramsci’s integral conceptualisation
of state–civil society, culture, and popular common sense to develop her
trenchant analyses of the ways in which Hindutva nationalists have embed-
ded a masculinist-ethnicised conception of the nation in everyday practices,
thus refashioning Hinduism ‘to shape a sword out of a cross’.41 Crucially for
our project, Bannerji has also mobilised Gramsci and Fanon in her critique
of the subalternists’ de-socialised conceptualisation of nationalism. She
sees the subalternists’ selective reading of the (anti-)colonial archive and
their cultural-ontological critique of modernity as a ‘patriarchal Brahminical
description’, an ‘ideological strategy … [whereby] the story of women’s con-
tainment and betrayal by cultural nationalism becomes the story of their con-
tentment and valorisation’.42
This relational and strategic mobilisation of Gramsci has also recently been
taken up on the other side of the Radcliffe line in Pakistan. For example, Aasim
35 See also Mallick 2017; Hart 2015.

36 Laclau 1977; Hall 1980; Modonesi 2014.
37 Kaviraj 1988.
38 Patnaik 1988.
39 Ahmad 1996b, 1996c; Bannerji 2001b, 2011.
40 Ahmad 1996b.
41 Bannerji 2011, p. 53.
42 Bannerji 2001b, p. 72.

Sajjad Akhtar has productively deployed Gramscian concepts of ‘hegemony’,

‘common sense’, and ‘historical bloc’ to trace the shifting modes of coercion,
consent, and patronage politics instituted in post-1970s Pakistan as a response
to the height of the subaltern ‘politics of resistance’ in the 1960s and ’70s.43
Signalling his distinction from the Subalternists’ (ultimately narrow) cultur-
alist and dualist conceptions, Akhtar grounds Pakistan’s changing histori-
cal bloc and its modes of rule within the ‘articulation of historically rooted
[i.e. colonially-inflected] practice with evolving logics of the market, instru-
mentalization of “democratic” exercises such as elections, and the forging of
ideational innovations [around “Islam”] congruent with regional and global
geo-politics’.44
Relatedly, Majed Akhter has analysed the 1960s anti-Communist ‘hydropo-
litical Cold War’ in Pakistan through the role of state-bureaucratic elites and
water engineers as ‘traditional intellectuals’.45 Such ‘traditional intellectuals’
acted as conduits of technical-financial assistance and ideological discourses
(from the metropolitan core to the periphery) regarding the ‘necessity’ of
high-modernist infrastructure (such as massive dams) as part of a ‘develop-
mentalist passive revolution’, even as this exacerbated socio-spatial inequal-
ities within the country. More recently, we have brought together Gramscian
conceptualisations of ‘subalternity’, ‘passive revolution’, ‘integral state’, and
‘the conjuncture’ to delineate the working class’ socio-spatial pacification
and fragmentation in post-1970s Karachi.46 Here, returning (via Marx, Fanon,
and Hall) to Gramsci’s differentiated understanding of subalternity and the
conjuncture, along with a multi-level mobilisation of ‘passive revolution’ (mov-
ing through the terrain of everyday life, the urban, to the state and world impe-
rialism), lends insight into the varied contradictions that crystallised through
the rhythms of ‘the urban question’ and produced ‘ethnicity’ as a salient (often
violent) node of socio-political mobilisation.
This alternative stream of Gramscianism, therefore, has maintained fidel-
ity to the Sardinian’s vision and method, including the problem of political
strategy and the weight of fascist lineages so often forgotten in the subalternist
tradition.47 In doing so, they have both critiqued the subalternists’ divorce of
Gramsci from his relational concerns and conducted carefully situated trans
lations of Gramsci to post-colonial contexts. Along with Said, Morton, Salem,
43 Akhtar 2018.
44 Akhtar 2018, pp. 133–4.
45 Akhter 2015a, 2015b.
46 Mallick 2020a.
47 Zachariah 2020.

Shapiro, Lazarus and Thomas, we understand ‘translation’ as the travelling-

transposition of theory as politically constructed in ‘a differential rather than
identitarian relation’, which in turn transforms the ‘original’ theory or con-
cept in a ‘retrospective reconfiguration’.48 Taking seriously Callinicos’s warn-
ings against over-extending Gramsci, we also recognise that the translation
of ‘concepts’ is no mere intellectual exercise but is upheld only in relation to
a ‘vigorous anti-thesis’,49 that is, in relation to radical, collective transformation.
Here, ‘translation’ – embedded in differentiated socio-cultural ensembles –
merges into ‘living philology’, with its careful attention to particular contexts;
in Lenin’s terms, ‘the concrete analysis of concrete situations’. As we will
elaborate below, in the latter Gramscian lineage, we thus detect a concern
for ‘living philology’ and critical historicism whereby concepts travel by inter-
vening in spatio-temporally specific conjunctures. Theory thus travels not by
mechanical deployment, a mere extension with scant regard to originating
context. The travels of theory instead require a labour of ‘translation’: a phil-
ological excavation of a concept’s originary specificity and its equally careful
travel-transformation into a distinct but related historico-spatial conjuncture,
even while keeping the strategic horizons of theory intact. In this sense, the
carefully historicised renderings of Gramsci by Bannerji, Ahmad and others
pre-figured the philological turn in Gramsci scholarship.
2 Gramsci’s Historicism
The English-language philological turn in Gramsci scholarship consolidated

our understanding of Gramsci’s historicism partly through a discussion of the
subaltern.50 For Gramsci, subalternity is not reducible to a camouflaged analy-
sis of the industrial proletariat. It describes relations of power and modalities of
subordination which circumscribe and disorganise subaltern groups’ capacity
as autonomous and effective historical agents51 while organising the coherence
of dominant class fractions in and through the integral state.52 Subalternity is
thus not a matter of being in or outside fixed social locations. Subaltern groups
(a term that, tellingly, Gramsci always deploys in the plural) are a product of
layered and multidimensional relations, existing in various ‘combinations of
phases … [with] the line of development [tending] towards integral autonomy’,
48 Thomas 2020b, pp. 24, 16; see also: Said 2000a; Morton 2013; Shapiro and Lazarus 2018;
Salem 2020.
49 Gramsci Q15 §62 [Gramsci 1971, pp. 114ff.].
50 Green 2011, 2013; Green and Ives 2009; Thomas 2020a.
51 Gramsci Q3 §90 [Gramsci 2011, p. 91]; Q3 §18 [Gramsci 2011, pp. 24–5].
52 Gramsci Q25 §2 [Gramsci 1971, pp. 54–5]; Q3 §48 [Gramsci 2011, pp. 48–52].

and as such, incorporating uneven and shifting combinations of coercive and

consent-like forms within the involucro of the integral state.53
Gramsci was greatly interested in how racial theories rooted in aristocratic
notions of inherited status become part of subaltern conceptions (through
popular literature, for example)54 and how these may superimpose themselves
on class struggle.55 A focus on racism also elucidated the relationships between
‘internal’ and ‘external’ aspects of the weakly unified Italian state. First, racio-
logical distinctions, upheld even by left-wing intellectuals, helped justify the
subjugation of Southerners by treating them as biological and cultural infe-
riors (‘barbarians’). The historically malleable, socio-economic character of
North–South relations thus became obscured and naturalised: ‘once again,’
Gramsci caustically remarked in The Southern Question, ‘“science” was used to
crush the wretched and exploited; but this time it … claimed to be the science
of the proletariat’.56 Second, racism justified Italy’s imperial adventures, tying
capital export and colonial settlement in North and East Africa to aspirations
of land-hungry Italians, including Southerners.57
These reflections were crucial for Gramsci’s approach to the subaltern.
They underscored the proximity between the naturalising proclivities of racist
thought and the positivism permeating various disciplines (economics, soci-
ology, criminology) and political currents, also on the left. For Gramsci, intel-
lectuals’ support for Italian imperialism in Africa, and their racist views of the
Italian South, were subtended by economistic tendencies that treated classes
and social groups not in a dynamic and relational, but a static, mechanical and
pathologising fashion.58 The works of Achille Loria (economist and member
of the Italian Socialist Party) and Cesare Lombroso were clues to Mussolini’s
fascism,59 and the Left’s inadequacy in understanding subaltern revolt or in
disentangling subaltern agency from that of ruling groups.60
53 Gramsci Q25 §5 [Gramsci 1971, pp. 52ff.]; Thomas 2020a, pp. 190–1.
54 Gramsci Q16 §23 [Gramsci 2012, pp. 1829–32]; Q17 §43 [Gramsci 2012, pp. 1885–6]; Q7 §50
[Gramsci 2012, p. 901].
55 Gramsci Q7 §51 [Gramsci 2012, p. 902].
56 Gramsci 1978, pp. 444ff.; Gramsci Q1 §44 [Gramsci 2012, p. 108]; Q2 §45 [Gramsci 2012, pp.
256–7]; Q7 §30 [Gramsci 2012, pp. 884–6]; Q17 §24 [Gramsci 2012, p. 1957].
[Gramsci 2012, pp. 1603–4].
[Gramsci 2012, pp. 1432–4]; Q13 §18 [Gramsci 2012, pp. 1569–75]; Q28 §18 [Gramsci 2012,
pp. 2223–37]; see also: Green 2013; Buttigieg 1992, pp. 43–56.
[Gramsci 2012, pp. 1386–7]; Buttigieg 1992, p. 48.

By highlighting these issues, the philological turn helps us grasp the polit-
ically charged methodological procedures in Gramsci’s writing.61 Based on
Italian scholarship on Gramsci’s conception of language,62 intellectuals associ-
ated with this turn have clarified, as did Stuart Hall,63 the close link between
Gramsci’s understanding of philology and his (re-)conceptualisation of Marxism
as a philosophy of praxis. Extending Marx’s own dialectical understanding of
the relationship between abstract and concrete,64 philology denotes a method
(of thinking, writing and acting) that develops through analyses of concrete
situations to arrive at conclusions: ‘the importance of ascertaining and precis-
ing particular facts in their unique and unrepeatable individuality … for isolat-
ing certain more general “laws of tendency”’.65 For Gramsci, philology becomes
‘living’ insofar as it rejoins daily organising efforts to act against subaltern
passivity; it is knowledge that is not simply a ‘translat[ion] into ideas and
words-as-force.… Rather it is acquired by the collective organism … through
experience of immediate particulars, through a system which one could call
“living philology”’.66 Understood thus, philology opens the door to a histori-
cism that links time and space through an open-ended method and develops
abstractions not by deductive reasoning but by working through concrete sit-
uations. Turned back on Gramsci, the philological turn suggests that Gramsci’s
philosophy of praxis must be related to the movement of his texts. In the fol-
lowing, constraints of space and scope compel us to focus on the results of
Gramsci’s writing more than the ‘pathways’ and ‘rhythms’ of its production.67
The same will be true for Fanon’s work.
Far from being ‘generic’, therefore, Gramsci’s is a particular kind of
historicism,68 different from teleology, developmentalism, and historical
relativism.69 In his oeuvre, Gramsci’s historicism is also closely related to
his secularism and his humanism,70 and thus includes a number of aspects.
First, Gramsci’s historicism is not relativist even though he himself called it
61 Green 2013; Buttigieg 1992, pp. 43–56; Thomas 2020a.

62 Ives and Lacorte (eds.) 2010.
63 Hall 1996a.
64 Hall 2003.
65 Gramsci Q11 §25 [Gramsci 1971, pp. 428ff., emphasis added]; Buttigieg 1990; Thomas 2009;
Haug 2000, 2001; Tosel 2009.
66 Gramsci Q11 §25 [Gramsci 1971, pp. 429ff., emphasis added]; Gramsci Q11 §25 [Gramsci
2012, pp. 1423–4].
67 See Liguori 2015 and Cospito 2016, respectively.
68 Tosel 2009, p. 98.
69 Morera 1990.
70 Thomas 2009.

absolute.71 In contrast to Ranke’s insistence that historical events can be under-

stood in self-enclosed isolation, as ‘they really were’, Gramsci did not deny the
intelligibility of cross-epochal temporal patterns in history and their articula-
tion, if not convergence, in specific conjunctures. He studied these patterns
and rhythms by taking concrete situations both as points of departure and
points of return. Refusing to fetishise particularity, Gramsci contended that ‘a
theory of history and politics can be made, for even if facts are always unique
and changeable, in the flux of movement of history, the concepts can be the-
orised. Otherwise … one would fall back into a new form of nominalism’.72 In
this light, the history of capitalism cannot be divided into ontologically distinct
temporal logics, those shaping the universal dynamics of capital accumulation
and those defining the history of particular nations, areas or civilisations.
Second, Gramsci’s historicism is also in evidence in his approach to ide-
alism and materialism. Critiquing Bukharin, Gramsci refuses to subordinate
Marxism to a mere variation of the wider philosophical current of materialism,
instead undertaking an immanent reconstruction of the neo-Hegelian (most
prominently, the works of Benedetto Croce) and metaphysical-materialist
(of the Bukharin–Stalin variety) trends of his day. As such, Gramsci insists on
the historicity of objectivity itself, emphasising that the reality of an ‘exter-
nal world’, while undeniable, can only be grasped through the specificities of
human spatio-temporal practice. Therefore ‘objectivity’ itself is always that
which is ‘humanly objective’, which ‘corresponds exactly to the “historically
subjective”: in other words, “objective” would mean “universal subjectivity”’.73
The historicity of objectivity leads into a third aspect of Gramsci’s histor-
icism: his epistemological emphasis on political practice, the ‘struggle for
objectivity … [which] is not a point of departure but a point of arrival’.74 This
expansion of Marx’s second thesis on Feuerbach gave rise to Gramsci’s for-
mulation of Marxism as a ‘philosophy of praxis’: indeed, as Thomas puts it,
‘Gramsci’s philosophical research in the Prison Notebooks could be regarded
as an extended and multifaceted meditation upon this [the second Thesis on
Feuerbach]’.75 It led Gramsci to reformulate the structure–superstructure
debate (as a relationship between social/economic, political and military
relations of force) and emphasise how political practice – the organisation,
coherence and consciousness of social forces emerging on the terrain of the
71 Morton 2007.
74 Gramsci Q11 §17 [Gramsci 1971, pp. 445–56, emphasis added].
75 Thomas 2009, pp. 308ff.

economic – plays the decisive role in transforming relations of force.76 In

foregrounding the moment of political practice in historical change, Gramsci
rejects teleologies of progress – whether of the ‘idealist’ or ‘materialist’
variety – as quasi-religious, while keeping intact the horizon of emancipa-
tion (i.e. communism).77 The weight of temporal patterns notwithstanding,
the role of politics reminds us that Gramsci assumes that history is funda-
mentally open to change. Thus, any attempt to read off politics or ideology
as ‘an immediate expression of the structure, must be contested in theory as
primitive infantilism’.78
Fourth, history cannot be reduced to a singular temporality.79 The history
of capitalism, too, is a product of multiple rhythms that meet with particu-
lar intensity in specific conjunctures. Drawing links between the event-like,
the conjunctural and the longue durée, Gramsci’s analyses of the Italian
Risorgimento and fascism represent powerful studies of the multi-temporality
of history. Among other things, Gramsci’s grounding in linguistics gave him a
keen awareness of temporal unevenness and multiplicity, that any phenome-
non or (synchronic) temporal frame is ‘a living thing and a museum of fossils
of life and civilisations’.80 Indeed, while this emphasis on temporal complex-
ity and articulation is crucial for forging genuinely global, non-Eurocentric
historical materialisms,81 it also absolves Gramsci of the charge of ‘expressive
totality’82 while conversely allowing him to avoid the opposite trap of positing
multiple – but ultimately disconnected – temporalities.83 Gramsci’s temporal-
ities are distinct but relational: ‘the present … is a continual interweaving of
many different times’; while these remain distinct, their relationship is ‘politi-
cally constituted’ through hegemonic practice.84 Conjunctures are thus joints
of co-constitution and contradiction, of active production and articulation of
multiple temporalities. Gramsci’s emphasis on the conjunctural relationality
of multiple rhythms therefore manages to conjoin diachronic with synchronic
aspects of reality, avoiding structural–functionalist and expressivist traps
while offering openings for political practice.
76 Gramsci Q13 §18 [Gramsci 1971, p. 167]; Q13, §17 [Gramsci 1971, p. 185]; Q7 §24 [Gramsci
1971, p. 407]; Hall 1996d, p. 42.
78 Gramsci Q7 §24 [Gramsci 1971, pp. 407ff.]; Morera 1990.
79 Morera 1990; Thomas 2009.
81 Morfino and Thomas (eds.) 2017.
82 Althusser 1969, pp. 203–4; Thomas 2017.
83 Chakrabarty 2000, p. 66.
84 Thomas 2017, pp. 290–1.

Fifth, space is never merely the passive backdrop of historical dynamism.

For Gramsci, who took heed of Bartoli’s spatially-inflected linguistics and
reflected deeply on Italy’s North–South relation, such a passive treatment of
geography was inconceivable.85 Instead, he constructed major concepts (folk-
lore, the intellectual, the integral state, hegemony, passive revolution) not only
with reference to historical moments but also in relation to geographical situ-
ations: city–country relations, the regional question, the relationship between
national and international scales.86 The mutual imbrication of coeval but hier-
archically ordered spaces is crucial for the rhythms of hegemony, ranging from
the role of architecture and urban modernisation as lubricants of bourgeois
hegemony to the uneven diffusion-combinations of ‘world-historical phe-
nomena’ such as Fordism.87 With regards to the latter, he remarks upon ‘the
superficial apish initiative’ of Europe’s anachronistic ruling classes – where
‘the implacable weight of its [i.e. the US’s] economic production … [is] com-
pelling Europe to overturn its excessively antiquated economic and social
basis’, ‘acquir[ing] a new coating in the American climate’.88 In turn, this mutu-
ally conditioned but uneven constitution of space also alerts us to Gramsci’s
delineation of passive revolution as a comparative and historical ‘criterion of
interpretation’ for elaborating the multi-scalar constitution of states and social
formations,89 an elaboration that is also at the heart of Fanon’s analysis of
(post-)colonial historical blocs.
Sixth, in Gramsci’s works, gods and spirits do not exist beyond the histori-
cal geographies of human existence.90 Gramsci was an uncompromising critic
of clericalism and the roles the Catholic Church played in state and popular
life.91 Yet, his historicist method did not allow his secular humanism to turn
into an a priori critique of all things religious; indeed, he dismissed the latter
approach as ‘an anti-historical error’ and ‘sheer metaphysics’.92 Religions can-
not be wished away and must be understood as ‘manifestations of the intimate
contradictions by which society is lacerated, … grandiose attempt[s] to recon-
cile, in mythological form, the real contradictions of historical life’.93 As human
products, they are not only doctrines but also ‘spontaneous philosophies’
85 Loftus 2020, pp. 11–13.

86 Kipfer 2004, 2013; Jessop 2006.
87 Kipfer 2013; Morton 2013; Akhter 2015a; Mallick 2018.
88 Gramsci Q22 §15 [Gramsci 1971, pp. 316–7].
89 Morton 2007, p. 138.
90 Said 2000b, pp. 128–31.

whose rationality is rooted in ‘once having been historically valid and having
performed a necessary function’.94 Reinvented in modern times as myth, they
shape subaltern lives and the struggles that define relations of force. In keep-
ing with the historicity (and practical bases) of objectivity, the ‘truth’ or ‘falsity’
of ideology, religion, and/or consciousness cannot be posited in an ‘external
world’ outside of human subjects because ‘truth’ crystallises contradictory
practices and conceptions in power-ridden conjunctures.95 Gramsci’s absolute
historicism and living philology therefore lead to a subtle approach to religion
as ideology, consciousness and common sense. Thus situated, religions are
subject to human action and historical transformation. As we will see, on this
point Gramsci rejoins Fanon’s approach to tradition and religion as historically
lived and contradictory forces.
3 From Gramsci towards Fanon
Gramsci’s spatial historicism is deeply interested in comparative differences

without ontologising them. While Gramsci was anchored in the European
world,96 his method, which is oriented towards translating distinct experi-
ences, insights and strategies, does not allow us to divide the world into air-
tight ‘East/West’ compartments. As already indicated, this is so partly because
Gramsci himself navigated various East–West relations: the relationship
between Italy and the Soviet Union as well as relations between various parts
of the Russian empire inherited by the Soviets. Already in these cases, we can
see that for Gramsci, comparative differences are permeated by cross-cutting
processes that co-constitute them and thus establish the possibility (but not
the guarantee) of translation.97
Commenting on religion, intellectuals, and forms of rule in India and in
societies influenced by Islam and Christianity, he stressed the unevenness of
religious practice while also mentioning the ways in which ‘civilisations’ (such
as ‘the West’) form through influences from others (in the Arab and Islamic
world, for example). These observations raise the possibility of comparing cul-
tural practices and social forms (such as caste relations) by relating them to
each other as well as to other aspects of their respective social formations.98
94 Gramsci Q11 §28 [Gramsci 1971, pp. 449ff.]; Frosini 2013, 2016; Boothman 2013.
95 Gramsci Q7, §21 [Gramsci 1971, p. 377]; Q11, §12 [Gramsci 1971, pp. 324–6, 333].
96 Tosel 2009, pp. 147–74.
97 Gramsci Q11 §47 [Gramsci 2012, p. 1457]; Q11 §48 [Gramsci 2012, pp. 1458–9].
98 Gramsci Q1 §134 [Gramsci 2012, pp. 178–9]; Q2 §86 [Gramsci 2012, p. 296]; Q2 §90
[Gramsci 2012, pp. 298–9]; Q5 §90 [Gramsci 2012, pp. 648–50]; Q4 §92 [Gramsci 2012, p.
570]; Q6 §32 [Gramsci 2012, pp. 734–5] ; Q6 §78 [Gramsci 2012, p. 769].

If civilisations are malleable and internally differentiated, what might make

them appear self-sufficient and bounded? Giving the example of ‘notions of
“East” and “West”’, Gramsci treats them as simultaneously ‘“objectively real”’
and ‘“historico-cultural” construction[s]’, ‘crystallised … from the point of view
of the European cultured classes as a result of their world-wide hegemony.…
[B]ecause of the historical content that has become attached to the geograph-
ical terms, the expressions East and West have finished up indicating specific
relations between different cultural complexes’.99 Thus, social-political prac-
tice (and classes) popularise historico-geographical constructions (of ‘unified’
social bodies) as part of wider, multi-scalar hegemonic projects.100
As we learn from Derek Boothman’s reconstruction of Gramsci’s minor
notes about the Middle East and the Maghreb, civilisations for him are both
interconnected and fraught.101 Stimulated by Comintern debates on the sub-
ject, which he witnessed in Moscow in the early 1920s, Gramsci’s comments
were neither systematic nor always reliable. Nevertheless, Gramsci’s obser-
vations about Saudi Arabia’s unification under Ibn Sa’ud, Kemalist Turkey,
post-Balfour Palestine, the Egyptian Wafd party, and the social distance
between the Islamic heartlands and the Maghreb share commonalities. Firstly,
they show Gramsci’s awareness of how much medieval Christianity and mod-
ern Europe owed to Islamic philosophy, language, and science. Secondly, rela-
tions between and within civilisations are subject to ‘rival hegemonies’ within
and between religious and secularising forces, between states, and between
dominant and subaltern groups in and across states.102 Thirdly, civilisations
are comparable because they are simultaneously porous and differentiated.
This allows Gramsci to relate Islamic worlds to Catholic Italy through common
themes: city–countryside relations, religion as common sense, and the role of
intellectuals and subalterns (notably peasants) in shaping the political mean-
ing of religion.
Gramsci’s minor comments about the Islamic world thus attempt to estab-
lish forms of ‘reciprocal translatability’ across civilisations.103 As the more
well-known analyses of the relationship between Italy, France, Germany, the
USA and the Soviet Union also show – alongside his comments on intellectuals,
state and civil society, Bonapartism, Fordism and Americanism, fascism, and
political strategy – Gramsci’s comparative vision of the world is best termed
‘relational’.104 Thus to confront Eurocentrism is not to invert Eurocentric
99 Gramsci Q11 §20 [Gramsci 1971, pp. 447].

100 Gramsci Q5 §29 [Gramsci 2012, pp. 601–2]; Q7 §§43, 44 [Gramsci 2012, pp. 897–8].
101 Boothman 2012, p. 119.
102 Boothman 2012, p. 139.
103 See also Dainotto 2013, p. 83.
104 Hart 2018.

narratives (about Europe’s supposed historical coherence and radiating qual-

ities) but to emphasise the contradictions, myths and lies of Europe and the
world-wide forces that helped build it. On the terrain of textual engagement,
Gramsci’s way of exploring the possibility of translating – and thus transform-
ing meaning from context to context – encourages us to read Gramsci in the
context of a wide web of intellectual life. His own relational vision pushes to
us look for transnational links with intellectuals who may share elements of
his historicist approach, albeit this time in a determinedly counter-colonial
vein.105 One of these intellectuals was Frantz Fanon.
At first sight, it may seem counterintuitive to connect the Martinican to
the Sardinian. Certain nationalist and Marxist traditions have converged in
declaring Fanon’s concerns with colonial violence, peasantry and the lumpen-
proletariat as antagonistic to Marxian (including Gramscian) preoccupations
with hegemony and urban-proletarian leadership.106 In turn, postmodern-
postcolonial interpreters have adopted Fanon as a precursor of poststructural-
ism while divesting his work of its links to national and tricontinental liberation
struggles.107 In these perspectives, which dominated 1990s English-language
Fanon scholarship, the Fanon–Gramsci connection is only possible provided
Gramsci, too, is read along post-Marxist and post-revolutionary lines.108 More
recently, those searching for a Nietzschean Fanon have erected new road-
blocks against a Gramsci–Fanon rapprochement by locating them on oppo-
site sides of an ontological divide separating Marxism and Blackness, or by
arguing that Fanon’s psychiatric work is incompatible with his historical-
materialist analyses (and commitments).109 Here, an insistence on the inter-
mittently Nietzschean elements in Fanon militates against acknowledging the
decisive Marxian–Hegelian and phenomenological currents in his work that
offer us the very lines of connection between Black, tricontinental and Marxist
traditions through which Fanon can be connected to Gramsci.
Our engagement with Gramsci-inspired currents centred in South Asia has
already indicated that separating Gramsci and Fanon from each other or from
105 Kipfer and Hart 2013; Bosteels 2014.

106 See Worsley’s early critique: Worsley 1972.
107 Bhabha 1999; Gates 1999.
108 This is how Fanon and Gramsci met, fleetingly, in the post-Marxist Stuart Hall (Hall
1996b, 1996c). A full discussion of how Gramsci and Fanon relate to Hall’s overall oeuvre is
beyond the scope of this paper. Our starting point for such a discussion would be the Hall
of Policing the Crisis (Hall et al. 1978, pp. 327–97) and thus the Gramscian Hall of the same
period who helped shape this paper.
109 See Wilderson 2003, and Marriott 2018, pp. 2, 19, 190–231, on the first and second points,
respectively.

revolutionary anti-imperial and Marxist connections is not necessary. Himani

Bannerji’s project to tie Fanon to Gramsci (along with Marx and Dorothy Smith)
for the purpose of understanding ideology and unearthing the roots of fascism
is a powerful counterpoint to those wanting to tear Gramsci apart from Fanon.
The problems with anti-dialectical, anti-Marxist and anti-Gramscian readings
of Fanon are also clearly highlighted by English-language Fanon scholarship
developed and organised by Ato Sekyi-Otu, Nigel Gibson and Lewis Gordon.110
The Hegelian-Marxist and existentialist poles of this scholarship pointed out
that postcolonial readings of Fanon were difficult to sustain. Their philosoph-
ical anti-humanism had to treat Fanon’s undeniable dialectical humanism as
an embarrassment. And their tendency to read the Fanon of Black Skin, White
Masks against the Fanon of The Wretched of the Earth missed the ways in which
Fanon’s work, while characterised by important shifts, articulates micrologi-
cal concerns with everyday racism and subjective suffering with macrologi-
cal considerations of historical geography and revolutionary politics due to
its steadfast commitment to liberating human possibilities from racialised
and colonial brutalities.111 Hegelian-Marxist and existentialist forms of Fanon
scholarship remain pertinent because they furnish the best counterarguments
against Nietzschean Fanonisms. They remind us that Fanon’s critique of rac-
ism as an ontologising project cannot accept the ontology of a racist world
(even if merely negatively), that the fissures in Fanon’s work are not unsur-
mountable obstacles for dialectical, neo-humanist, historical-materialist and
eminently political interpretations, and that Fanon’s clinical psychiatric work
was an inspiration and complex complement, not a counterpoint, to his polit-
ical and strategic insights.112
Fanon’s advice to always ‘slightly stretch’ ‘Marxist analysis … when it
comes to addressing the colonial issue’ is not a minor point.113 It forces his-
torical materialists to come to terms with the role of racism and colonialism
in shaping capitalism and class relations. Fanon signals his intent to translate
Marx properly, not merely to extend him to different contexts but to adapt
110 For Fanon’s presence in other languages, see, most recently, Batchelor and Harding (eds.)
2017; Gibson (ed.) 2021; Mallick 2021; Kipfer 2021a.
111 Sekyi-Otu 1996; Gibson 2003; Gordon 2015; Rabaka 2010.
112 On the first and second points: Sekyi-Otu 2018, 2021; Abdel-Shehid and Noori (eds.) 2021;
Mallick 2020b; Kipfer 2021b; Gibson (ed.) 2021; On the last point: Gibson and Beneduce
2017. For more on the peculiarities of Fanon’s dialectic, see Bernasconi 1996; Gibson 1999;
Turner 1996, 1999; Cicciarello-Maher 2017; Hudis 2017.
113 Fanon 2001, p. 5; Fanon 1968, p. 9.

his work by betraying him if necessary.114 In this stretching, Fanon transformed

Marxian, Hegelian and phenomenological insights through Black radical and
anti-colonial ways of understanding the depths of modern racism and the spe-
cificities of colonialism. In contexts shaped by Third World revolutions and
national liberation struggles, he reshuffled the relationship between proletar-
iat, peasantry and sub-proletariat in revolutionary strategy in part by recast-
ing the relationship between city and country, nation-state and world order,
Europe and the (neo-) colonised Southern continents.115
Refusing to accept the Manichean ontology of the colonial world, Fanon
embarked on a multi-dimensional mission – psychiatric, philosophical, and
political – to transform that world at all levels (from everyday life to macro-
structures of imperial capitalism). Doing so brought Fanon into effective
(not merely stated) proximity to Gramsci’s new humanism, his historico-
geographical analysis of the underdeveloped Italian historical bloc, his strategic
understanding of the relationship between leadership and spontaneity, and his
‘politicist’ take on the dialectic as a project to transform economic-corporate
consciousness.116 In turn, Fanon’s vantage points (in the French empire) and
intellectual sources (Black radical and tricontinental liberation) mean that his
perspective can help redirect Gramsci’s legacy. We can thus see a new Gramsci,
one developed and transformed by a Fanon who neither met nor discussed
him, a Gramsci who was, following Ato Sekyi-Otu’s memorable expression, a
‘precocious Fanonist’.117
In this paper, which is focused on Gramsci more than Fanon, we do not have
the space to pay full attention to the ‘rhythms’ of Fanon’s work.118 What we
want to do here is to elaborate on the ways in which Gramsci’s work resonates
in Fanon, and vice versa.119 To begin, Fanon never abandoned but transfigured
(yes, translated) critical historicism. He accepted a transient conception of
time-space that provides openings for a fundamental transformation of the
world, a transformation that Fanon saw as mediated by a liberatory ‘dialectic
of experience’.120 Fanon too did not reduce space to the fixities produced by
114 Arnall 2020, p. 10, briefly references Gramsci. In his book, however, this dialectical point
is neutralised by the Nietzschean Fanonism he borrows in part from Marriott.
115 For recent discussions, see: Zeilig 2016; Hudis 2015, pp. 92–139; Turner and Kelley 2021.
116 Sekyi-Otu 1996, pp. 29–30, 129–30, 148–50, 180, 204.
117 Sekyi-Otu 1996, p. 118. We say this given the lack of evidence of an explicit connection
between Gramsci and Fanon. Jean-Paul Sartre’s project to publish Gramsci in French in
the mid-1950s provides a possible source of evidence, to be explored further (Crézégut
2020, pp. 434–5).
118 To paraphrase Cospito 2016.
119 See also Kipfer and Hart 2013.
120 Sekyi-Otu 2011, p. 48.

racist dehumanisation in the (neo-)colonial world, nor did he deal with space
metaphorically, as a ‘third space’ opening up between linguistic signifiers, as
deconstructive-postcolonial readings have suggested. On the one hand, Fanon
was highly attuned to the spatial fetishisms of post-colonial rule and une-
ven development: ‘to hide this stagnation … to give itself something to boast
about, the [national] bourgeoisie can find nothing better to do than to erect
grandiose buildings in the capital’.121 Conversely, Fanon’s reflections on the
Algerian revolution’s ‘liberated districts’ are apposite. There, the fln ‘had to
modify production, which formerly looked only towards the town and towards
export. We have organised production to meet consumers’ needs’ and with the
people now ‘asking themselves theoretical questions: for example, why did
certain districts never see an orange before the war of liberation while thou-
sands of tons are exported every year abroad? … Today the people have a very
clear notion of what belongs to them’.122 Like Gramsci, Fanon’s take on histor-
ical transformation-in-struggle is geographical in a dynamic fashion, treating
city and countryside, nation and world-order as products of social processes
and objects of struggle.123 This allows us to see why Fanon’s call for a genu-
ine decolonisation through national and tricontinental liberation represents
a hegemonic project.124 It is an attempt to build a new historical bloc articu-
lating multiple temporalities and spatial scales while transforming (instead of
accepting in their current state) relationships between subaltern groups (peas-
ants and lumpenproletarians first, then workers and intellectuals) and spaces
(city and countryside in national contexts that are also conduits to changing
world orders).
Importantly, Fanon’s conception of power was multidimensional, tying
together everyday life with the state, as did Gramsci’s. In their thing-like char-
acter and Manichean crudeness, the capacity of colonial social relations to
integrate subaltern groups is limited. Colonialism’s maintenance of at least a
‘minimum of terror’125 helps explain the particularly deep contradictions that
face anti-colonial movements. And yet, for Fanon, racialised relations of sub-
ordination in the colonies – and the racisms experienced by (post-)colonial
subjects in the metropole – are never purely coercive. Despite the Manichean
character of colonial racism (reinforced often by stark spatial segregations),
the coloniser and the colonised, the colonial state and subjects relate to each
121 Fanon 2001, p. 133.

122 Fanon 2001, pp. 154–5.
123 Kipfer 2011.
124 Persaud 1997; Gordon 2015, pp. 125–6.
125 Fanon 2015, p. 510.

other through varying combinations of coercive and consent-like relations

of subordination. We know this in part from Fanon’s psychiatric work, which
helped him understand how colonial relations produce an ‘inferiority com-
plex’ among the colonised through ‘a double process: first, economic [and]
then, internalisation or rather epidermalization of his [sic] inferiority’.126 In
fact, as Hourya Bentouhami,127 Nigel Gibson and Roberto Beneduce128 have
pointed out, Fanon’s analyses of pathologisation, sexualisation and crimi-
nalisation developed through clinical practice, against dominant strands of
European psychiatry and the Algiers school,129 represent crucial points of
contact with Gramsci’s understanding of subalternity, the latter developed in
part through critiques of the naturalising and biologising arguments made by
Italian intellectuals.
As mentioned earlier, Fanon’s lifework was committed to articulating
multiple levels of reality: everyday life and its psychological dynamics were
tied to the world-historical aspects of political life. Thus, his injunctions on
moving from ‘the consciousness of self … [to] national consciousness, which
is not nationalism, and is the only thing that will give us an international
dimension’.130 Here, we may compare our approach to Sara Salem’s inter-
vention, which draws upon Gramsci and Fanon to understand Egypt’s inser-
tion into the ‘colonial international’ and how the latter conditions the fragile
hegemony of post-independence historical blocs.131 We agree with much of
Salem’s Fanonist project of ‘stretching’ Marxism by making Marxist-Gramscian
theory ‘travel’ to Southern contexts.132 However, as elaborated earlier, ours is
a more concerted focus on the epistemological and methodological conver-
gences of Fanon and Gramsci. Crucially, and in contradistinction to Salem, our
elucidation of the Gramsci–Fanon convergence offers openings to connect
multiple levels of analysis and social practice in a non-reductive manner – i.e.
moving through the terrains of everyday life, popular common sense, all the
way to the ‘node’ of the nation and the global imperium. It is this multi-level
mobilisation of the Gramsci–Fanon convergence which makes it generative
for elucidating (what Gramsci called) the ‘terrain of the conjunctural’,133 i.e.
126 Fanon 1952a, p. xv.

127 Bentouhami 2014, pp. 101–8.
128 Gibson and Beneduce 2017, pp. 101, 258.
129 Fanon 1968, pp. 215–28; Fanon 1952b, pp. 115–69; Fanon 2015, pp. 342–43, 345–60.
130 Fanon 2001, p. 199.
131 Salem 2020, p. 78.
132 Salem 2020, pp. 8, 16.

the slippages, contradictions, and articulations through which hegemonic

blocs are anchored, and which offer nodes of intervention for alternative, inte-
gral hegemonic projects.
In this multi-level frame, Fanon’s emphasis on political practice as a dynamic
of liberation-transformation with universalising potentials allows us to stress
another point of epistemological convergence with Gramsci. Just as Gramsci
emphasises the struggle for objectivity in the forging of a concrete universal-
ity beyond the reifications of class, race, and other forms of subalternity, for
Fanon too, there is no ‘objective dialectic’ that (colonial) subjects must meas-
ure up to passively. In fact, it is the experience of (racialised) immediacy, the
‘consciousness [which] needs to get lost in the night of the absolute … a vir-
tually substantial absoluity’,134 which forms a departure point for the long arc
of a ‘dialectic of experience’. This is that ‘knowledge of the practice of action’
culminating eventually – and provisionally – in a partisan universalism.135 It
is this ‘activistic materialism’, the aspiration for ‘man [sic] to be actional’,136
which brings Fanon’s understanding of the dialectic into concrete convergence
with Gramsci’s.137 For both, then, it is the art of politics – and the dialectic of
experience therein – which is ‘Marxism’s Archimedean point’.138
We can elaborate this epistemological-political convergence in the two
thinkers’ reflections on intellectuals. Gramsci sees the relationship between
the masses and intellectuals as follows: ‘the popular element “feels” but does
not always know or understand; the intellectual element “knows” but does not
always understand and in particular does not always feel’.139 His exhortation
that ‘intellectuals and people-nation’ should relate through a ‘feeling-passion
[that] becomes understanding and thence knowledge’,140 resonates with
Fanon who berates the anti-colonial intellectuals’ tendency to dredge the past
for an ‘authentic’, ‘pre-colonial’, or ‘pre-modern’ culture as a ‘banal search for
exoticism’. Instead, the intellectual must ‘on the contrary shake the people’:
forging of a national culture ‘tak[ing] its place at the very heart of the struggle
for freedom’, a process ‘perpetually in motion’ whereby the colonised awaken
to their agency through involvement in the anti-colonial struggle.141 Thus,
Fanon calls upon intellectuals to join the people ‘in that fluctuating movement
134 Fanon 1952a, p. 113.

135 Fanon 2001, p. 118; Sekyi-Otu 1996, p. 31.
136 Fanon 1952a, p. 197; emphasis in original.
137 Sekyi-Otu 1996, p. 119.
138 Thomas 2006, p. 67.
141 Fanon 2001, p. 188; Fanon 1968, p. 163.

which they are just giving shape to’,142 to perform a ‘critical interlocution’ and
generate – in an echo of Gramsci’s calls for ‘translation’ – ‘a common vocab-
ulary of disputation and concerted action’ and ‘universal understandings of
contestable claims’.143 Significantly, both Fanon’s and Gramsci’s salutary warn-
ings of intellectuals’ failing in their historical vocation are very congruent. The
intellectuals’ inability to join with the people and forge alternative, expansive
hegemonies nourishes reaction: in Fanon’s words: ‘a few reforms at the top,
a flag waving: and down there at the bottom an undivided mass … endlessly
marking time’, in Gramsci’s: ‘zone[s] of passivity in which it would be possible
to enrol Vendée-type armies’.144
Their comments on intellectuals underline that for Fanon and Gramsci, the
art of politics – organisation, leadership, tactical and strategic sensibility – is
decisive in appropriating space-time and tackling either the coercive or consent-
like dimensions of power.145 In their respective understandings of dialectics,
politics is a practice to understand and transform ‘spontaneous’ subaltern sub-
jectivity, consciousness and common sense (religious or otherwise).146 Here,
Gramsci’s reflections on ‘the healthy nucleus that exists in “common sense”,
the part of it which can be called “good sense” and which deserves to be made
more unitary and coherent’ meet concretely with Fanon’s injunctions to not
‘hide [behind] the lecturers’ wish to cheat the people’, to ‘speak the language
of the everyday … then you will realise that the masses are quick to seize every
shade of meaning’.147 Such a transformation asks for organisational strat-
egies and collective politico-pedagogical methods to construct a properly
post-colonial revolutionary historical bloc. Situated within the everyday con-
tradictions that shape subaltern groups, this transformation aims at the end
of subalternity as such: ‘the more the people understand, the more watchful
they become, and the more they realise that everything depends on them’.148
This is the formation of liberated subjectivities and autonomous capacities
for action reaching beyond what Gramsci called economic-corporate inter-
ests and what Fanon diagnosed as the fixed, Manichean subjectivities pro-
duced by colonial racism.149
142 Fanon 2001, p. 182; Fanon 1968, pp. 156–7.

143 Sekyi-Otu 1996, pp. 179–80.
144 Fanon 2001, p. 118; Gramsci Q19 §24 [Gramsci 1971, p. 79].
145 It might be suggested that Gramsci and Fanon are both translating Marx and Lenin here.
For Gramsci, see Liguori 2015, pp. 57–60, and Cospito 2016, pp. 207, 228–9.
146 Fanon 1968, pp. 63–94.
147 Gramsci Q11 §12 [Gramsci 1971, p. 328]; Fanon 2001, pp. 152.
148 Fanon 2001, pp. 154.
149 Sekyi-Otu 1996, pp. 16, 130.

Reading his commentaries on radio, medicine, the Algerian family, urban

space and anticolonial struggles,150 one realises that for Fanon political inter-
vention is capable of appropriating space-time and liberating the promises of
modernity from the constraints and distortions of patriarchal colonialism and
imperialism.151 Thus, the radio – once received in Algeria as ‘Frenchmen talk-
ing to Frenchmen’ – became, through Algerian society’s ‘autonomous deci-
sion to embrace the new technique’, the bearer of ‘an acted truth’, the ‘means
of … the right of entry into the struggle of an assembled people’, of ‘linking
the fellah to an immense tyranny-destroying wave … from all the corners of
the world’.152 While Gramsci never had to grapple with the depths of dehu-
manisation wrought by racial slavery and colonialism, these comments reveal
another point of contact between Fanon and Gramsci: dialectical human-
ism. For Fanon, decolonisation is a universalising humanist project. Yet, as
in Gramsci, for whom ‘the person’ is not an isolated atom but an ‘ensemble
of historically determined social relations’,153 this project is not illusory, that
is, narrowly humanist and falsely universal. Neither bourgeois nor colonial,
it is not a project of a particularist ethno-class, its members masquerading
as coherent individual subjects: ‘Men’, to speak with Sylvia Winter.154 Indeed,
both Fanon and Gramsci reject a rootless, abstract universalism which uneas-
ily hides its (white, bourgeois) particularity, Fanon caustically terming such
universality as that of ‘a race of angels’, while Gramsci calling it an ‘objectivity
that exists even apart from man [sic] … a form of mysticism’ and emphasising
‘the struggle for objectivity … [which is] the struggle for the cultural unifi-
cation of the human race’.155 In particular, Fanon’s new humanism does not
abstract from the dense alienations (and blockages) of colonialism, capital-
ism and patriarchy: in short, it is ‘partisan-universal’ in character.156 Humans’
potential is as-yet unexplored and can only be developed in a dialectical fash-
ion: rooted in, transforming, and reaching beyond lived situations and the
various social forces sedimented in these.
Sharing a partisan universalism emerging from the grounds of lived
experience, Fanon and Gramsci converge on the ‘national’ as a key node of
150 Fanon 2011, pp. 53–133; Fanon 1968; Fanon 2015.

151 Sekyi-Otu 1996, p. 181.
152 Fanon 1965, pp. 76, 84, 96–7.
153 Gramsci Q13 §20 [Gramsci 2012, p. 1574]; Q7 §35 [Gramsci 2012, p. 891].
154 Wynter suggested, as Fanon did, that the violent falsehoods of colonial, patriarchal and
bourgeois humanisms should not push one to treat humanism as a property of ‘Europe’
(Wynter 2000, pp. 195–7).
155 Fanon 2001, pp. 175ff.; Gramsci Q11 §17 [Gramsci 1971, pp. 445–6, emphasis added].
156 Sekyi-Otu 1996, p. 240.

transformation, which helps develop their shared historico-geographical

understanding of life and politics. Because colonial capitalism – and asso-
ciated changes in productive forces, socio-spatial relations, and ideational
flows – works through a dialectic of spatial homogenisation and differentiation,
nationalism does not simply remain a ‘derivative discourse’, as in subalternist
terminology. Multi-scalar and colonial capitalism grounds the socio-spatial
‘scale’ or ‘node’ of the ‘national’ as an eminent basis for material and discur-
sive appropriation.157 Invoking the ‘national-popular’ (Gramsci) or ‘national
consciousness’ (Fanon) is therefore neither repetition of capitalist-colonial
abstract space, nor a retreat from universalist politics to one of irredeemable
particularity. On the contrary, Fanon advocates the development of a national
consciousness which is decisively ‘not nationalism’ but a political practice that
is at once ‘national, revolutionary, and social’.158 In such a dialectical vision,
identity does not cancel difference, but articulates-sublates it; the relationship
between the particular and universal here is discovered to be one of practical
mediation, not opposition. To speak with Fanon, there is no inherent conflict
between the particularity of ‘the national’ and the search for a common/uni-
versal humanity, because the ‘building of a nation is of necessity accompanied
by the discovery and encouragement of universalising values … it is at the heart
of national consciousness that international consciousness lives and grows’.159
In these reflections on the ‘national-popular’ – and their ensconcement in
multi-scalar rhythms (and ambitions) – Fanon and Gramsci’s strategic diagno-
ses of bourgeois nationalism and modernity find another convergence. Both
develop their analyses in an internationalist vein and in distinctly transna-
tional contexts: the Communist International for Gramsci, and the networks
of Panafrican and tricontinental revolution for Fanon (which also share lines
of connection to early Soviet debates). In so doing, they provide perceptive
insights into the degeneration of bourgeois nationalisms, their resort to coer-
cion and their tendency to both mobilise and narrow fragmented popular
memories and common sense. For Fanon, the peripheral national bourgeoisie –
a class that is ‘incapable of instituting itself as a class’ – eschews the reme-
diation of socio-spatial inequities, heralding a ‘false decolonisation’. Fanon’s
diagnoses of ‘false decolonisation’, the entrenchment of colonial socio-spatial
divides, and various forms of Bonapartism, serve to ‘stretch’ the Gramscian
concept of ‘passive revolution’ to the (post-)colony: the ‘logic of (a certain type
of) modernity … a melancholy tale in which the mass of humanity is reduced
157 Smith 2008; Goswami 2004.

158 Fanon 2001, p. 117; Fanon 1968, p. 94.
159 Fanon 2001, p. 199; Fanon 1968, p. 175.

to mere spectators’.160 Indeed, Fanon diagnoses the timidness and limitations

of the postcolonial bourgeoisie in strikingly similar terms to Gramsci’s on the
Italian Risorgimento. Here is a social group haunted at each turn by its own
limitations, by its grounding in ‘activities of the intermediary type’, ‘a bour-
geoisie in spirit only’, ‘unable to bring about coherent social relations’.161 Thus,
in a bid for mass pacification, it resorts to a state that ‘does not … reassure the
ordinary citizen, but rather one that rouses his [sic] anxiety’, ‘seeks to impose
itself in spectacular fashion’, and finally, institutes a ‘fascism at high inter-
est’ where people are asked ‘to fall back into the past’ and ‘to become drunk
on remembrance’.162
False decolonisation is thus a modality of racialised and metropole-
dependent passive revolution, which takes place within the material-ideological
terrain of national civil and political society and in their ‘nodal’ production
as part of the multi-scalar dialectic of capitalism. The conceptualisations of
passive revolution and false decolonisation that emerge from Fanon’s and
Gramsci’s respective transnational and strategic orientations are fruitful to
compare metropolitan and post-colonial populisms. In their appreciation of
the national ‘node’, the synchronic articulation of ‘past’ material-ideological
fragments, and the multi-scalar rhythms of capital, Fanon and Gramsci
eschew civilisational ontologies. Thus, a Fanonian Gramsci helps us think
through the specificity of (post-)colonial formations, while avoiding the twin
traps of reified difference and abstract universalism. It is this politicist and
open Marxism that lends itself to relational and strategic diagnoses of con-
temporary morbid symptoms.
4 Against the Clash(es) of Civilisation
Bringing Gramsci closer to Fanon opens up a plural, not Western conception of

Marxism.163 It provides a definitive alternative to the imaginary of civilisational
clash that weighs heavily on our world, not least the Euro-America caught
up in the frenzy of anti-Muslim racism. Offering us a world divided into cul-
tural blocs defined by homogenous and self-centred dynamics,164 culturalist
conceptions of civilisation remain Eurocentric.165 They also dovetail with
the post-fascist cultural racisms Fanon identified in his 1956 address to the
160 Thomas 2006, p. 73.

161 Fanon 2001, pp. 132–3, 144; emphasis added.
162 Fanon 2001, pp. 132, 135, 138.
163 Haug 1987.
164 Mamdani 2004.
165 Amin 1989.

first Congress of Black Writers and Artists.166 They have nothing to do with
the modes of life Marxist and anti-colonial intellectuals had in mind when
they called for new, post-capitalist and post-imperial civilisations,167 resulting
from a double transformation of the colonial world168 and an ‘integral’ recon-
struction of productive capacities, social relations, and ethical orientations.169
Needless to say, such epochal transformations presuppose the basic historicist
claims Fanon and Gramsci both made: that historical geography is multiform
and transient, and that subalternity, consciousness and, ultimately, the human
itself can be transformed by political practice.170
We have seen that Gramsci’s double critique of anti-Southern racism and
Italy’s putative imperial civilising mission also highlighted the contradictions
of Italy’s ruling bloc: the fragilities of bourgeois rule, the relations of subordina-
tion traversing popular life (and the left), and thus the socio-spatial obstacles
in the way of building a new historical bloc. We have also seen that Gramsci’s
analyses of the Italian situation dovetailed with his interest in the role of subal-
tern groups and intellectuals on other continents as well as the imperial world
order. On his part, Fanon insisted that the possibility of historico-geographical,
civilisational transformation arises from liberation struggles themselves, not
well-worn neo-colonial paths: submitting to civilising missions or reinventing
precolonial life abstractly, as a pregiven whole.171 In his well-contextualised
comments on the Négritude movement172 and Ali Shariati’s conception of
Islam,173 Fanon was interested in the capacity of these currents to oppose
Euro-American racism and imperialism, hoping that ‘authentic intellectu-
als may make good use of the immense cultural and social resources har-
boured in Muslim societies … [for] emancipation and the founding of another
humanity’.174 He also explored whether these currents could transform human
capacities instead of enclosing them in the traps of neocolonial culture, includ-
ing nationalism. On this front, Fanon was sceptical, fearing that ‘the return to
Islam appears as a withdrawal unto itself’ and ‘reviving sectarian and religious
mindsets could impede … and divert that nation yet to come … from its ideal
future, bringing it closer to its past’.175
166 Fanon 2006, pp. 39–52.

167 Césaire 1955, p. 54; Löwy 2011, p. 101.
168 Fanon 2015, pp. 476–80.
170 Hall 1988, p. 168; Bentouhami 2014, pp. 113–15.
171 Fanon 1968, pp. 141–74; Fanon 2006, pp. 39–52.
172 Fanon 2006, pp. 26–36; Fanon 1952b, pp. 88–114.
173 Fanon 2015, pp. 542–4.
174 Fanon 2018, pp. 668–9.
175 Fanon 2018, p. 669.

Facing distinct challenges, Fanon and Gramsci thus operated with concep-
tions of tradition that eschew the neo-Weberian counterposition of traditional
and modern forms of rationality. Articulating past and present, traditions
(including religions) are differentiated temporally, spatially and culturally;
they include multiple, contradictory currents that differ in their everyday dyna-
mism, their relationship to social groups, their spatial unevenness, and thus
their openness to being appropriated by emancipatory political practice.176 To
speak with Himani Bannerji, Fanon and Gramsci push us to decongeal civilisa-
tional abstractions as ideologies that sustain – often crisis-ridden – historical
blocs. Such ideological mobilisations of ‘Europe’, ‘West’, ‘Islam’, or ‘Hinduism’
thus serve to anchor class-based, racialised, and gendered projects within the
ambit of the ‘national’ integral state, even while drawing upon worldwide
civilisational discourses, less-than-national geographical configurations and
historically and socially specific fragments of colonial and anti-colonial con-
sciousness. The invocation of civilisational essences becomes a lubricant for
limited hegemonic projects, attempts to forge a tenuous unity of ‘the nation’
which circumvents and preys upon neo-imperial divisions of caste, ethnicity,
and uneven development.
Reading Gramsci with Fanon is to ‘globalise’ Gramsci, pushing Gramsci into
a fully anti-imperial and counter-colonial direction while remaining faithful to
their spatially historicist and relationally comparative method. Acknowledging
our debt to Southern Gramscians, some of whom also draw on Fanon, we
hold a Fanonian Gramsci to be particularly pertinent for analyses of historical
blocs, passive revolutions and intellectuals in the global South177 even as we
stress the importance of making the Gramsci–Fanon pairing central for strug-
gles against racism and capitalism in the imperial heartland.178 In both cases,
Gramsci and Fanon force us to read current conjunctures without surrender-
ing to civilisational-ontological abstractions or diagnoses that reduce the cur-
rent state of affairs to neoliberalism (as a Weberian ideal-type abstraction).
Today, false abstractions (civilisational claims to ‘the West’, ‘Islam’, ‘America’
etc.) are often conjunctural responses to crisis-ridden historical blocs, recast-
ing longer-term historical rhythms. It is this articulation of diachronicity with
synchronicity, this uneasy marriage of times and spaces out of joint, the unsta-
ble concatenation of grandiose visions with limited socio-spatial concessions
and exhausted hegemonic projects, which explains both the ferociousness of
the civilisational onslaught from ruling classes and the contradictions therein
176 Gramsci Q6 §84 [Gramsci 2012, pp. 777–8]; Q10 §59 [Gramsci 2012 1356]; Q22 §2 [Gramsci
2012, 2064]; Fanon 1968; Fanon 2006, pp. 39–52.
177 Mallick 2017, 2020a, 2020b, 2021; Akhtar 2018.
178 Hall et al.1978.

for an alternative political practice. Spatially nuanced historicism thus gives

us the means by which to grasp (not just denounce) the salience of civilisa-
tional ideologies. Rejecting the deductive reasoning of authoritarian cultur-
alism, Gramsci and Fanon want us to begin with (before returning to) lived
historico-geographical situations, the relations of rule and subordination that
govern them, the many mediations that shape ideological projects, and the
slippages and contradictions that may yet prove to be their Achilles’ heel.
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Kipfer Mallick 22 Gramsci Fanon: Stretch, Translate

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Kipfer Mallick 22 Gramsci Fanon: Stretch, Translate

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Historical Materialism (2022) 1–37

‘Stretch’ and ‘Translate’: Gramscian Lineages,

Stefan A. Kipfer | ORCID: 0000-0003-2919-2758

Ayyaz Mallick | orcid: 0000-0002-8412-8604

Antonio Gramsci – Frantz Fanon – critical historicism – humanism – relational

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2022 | doi:10.1163/1569206X-20222142

There is no established consensus on appropriating the work of Antonio

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2 See also Frosini 2018, pp. 210–11.

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and tricontinental liberation connect to debates that were formative for

7 Kipfer 2004, 2013, 2018; Mallick 2017, 2018.

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elevating these to the level of civilisational-ontological difference, thus allow-

1 A Gramsci for Post- and (Neo-)colonial Times?

In India, Ranajit Guha16 and Partha Chatterjee17 deployed Gramsci (among

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autonomous worlds, not in determinate relations to ruling circles.18 With the

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Heidegger.28 Here, Marxism belongs to ‘Europe’, as do reason, abstraction and

28 Mobilising Heidegger for historiographical purposes opposed to Eurocentrism is deeply

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35 See also Mallick 2017; Hart 2015.

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Sajjad Akhtar has productively deployed Gramscian concepts of ‘hegemony’,

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Shapiro, Lazarus and Thomas, we understand ‘translation’ as the travelling-

The English-language philological turn in Gramsci scholarship consolidated

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and as such, incorporating uneven and shifting combinations of coercive and

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61 Green 2013; Buttigieg 1992, pp. 43–56; Thomas 2020a.

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absolute.71 In contrast to Ranke’s insistence that historical events can be under-

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economic – plays the decisive role in transforming relations of force.76 In

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Fifth, space is never merely the passive backdrop of historical dynamism.

85 Loftus 2020, pp. 11–13.

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3 From Gramsci towards Fanon

Gramsci’s spatial historicism is deeply interested in comparative differences

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If civilisations are malleable and internally differentiated, what might make

99 Gramsci Q11 §20 [Gramsci 1971, pp. 447].

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narratives (about Europe’s supposed historical coherence and radiating qual-

105 Kipfer and Hart 2013; Bosteels 2014.

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revolutionary anti-imperial and Marxist connections is not necessary. Himani

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his work by betraying him if necessary.114 In this stretching, Fanon transformed

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121 Fanon 2001, p. 133.

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other through varying combinations of coercive and consent-like relations

126 Fanon 1952a, p. xv.

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the slippages, contradictions, and articulations through which hegemonic

134 Fanon 1952a, p. 113.

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142 Fanon 2001, p. 182; Fanon 1968, pp. 156–7.

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Reading his commentaries on radio, medicine, the Algerian family, urban

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