Subaltern Social Groups

The subaltern defined Antonio Gramsci's work. In this volume, Joseph A. Buttigieg's final gift to the world of Gramsci, devotedly assembled and fleshed out by his former student Marcus E. Green, we at last have the full view of how that definition came into being. A treasure. -- Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, author of "Can the Subaltern Speak?"
Antonio Gramsci's Prison Notebooks have become a kind of Marxist oracle, a well-spring of pithy passages deployed in the service of interminable debates, especially around questions of culture, civil society, the state, history, and the role of intellectuals. On first glance, Gramsci's 3,000 pages of research, reflections, and analyses may appear random, disordered, even coded. But serious Gramsci scholars know better, and there are few as serious as the late Joseph A. Buttigieg and Marcus E. Green. Their painstaking and judicious reconstruction of Gramsci's writings on subaltern groups raises the bar, revealing with greater clarity the systematic development of his ideas on history, class struggles, folk culture, the state, the dynamic and contingent character of social movements, and the limits of a utopian imagination. This volume challenges us all to stop plumbing Gramsci's notebooks for jewels and take the work and its context as a whole. Our scholarship and our movements will benefit. -- Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination
Buttigieg and Green have done a remarkable job in making available to the English-speaking world this groundbreaking text of the leading Marxist thinker of the twentieth century. -- Cornel West, Union Theological Seminary
Essential reading for all those interested in Gramsci. By skillfully combining a thematic with a philological approach and including relevant notes from the other prison notebooks, the editors reveal the profoundly historical nature of their author's thought. History is never shoehorned into predetermined boxes. Gramsci's theoretical concepts emerge out of history itself. -- Kate Crehan, author of Gramsci's Common Sense: Inequality and its Narratives