From Gramsci to Said: Culture, Politics, and Power
In the 1970s, around the time he was writing his landmark text Orientalism, the Palestinian-American critic Edward Said planned a volume engaging with the theories and methods of two towering figures of Western Marxism: the Hungarian philosopher and literary critic György Lukács, and the Italian communist leader and political thinker Antonio Gramsci. Said, whose relationship with Marxism was complicated and sometimes fraught, perceived Lukács and Gramsci as crucial for what he would later term his “secular” and “democratic” conception of criticism. Though the projected volume came to naught, elements of it converged into Said’s The World, the Text, and the Critic, while Gramscian concepts and questions animate many of Said’s writings, from The Question of Palestine to Culture and Imperialism. But what, specifically, makes criticism “secular” and “democratic”? How, for Said, do the works of Gramsci, in particular, help illuminate essential questions about the relationship between culture and politics, the role of the intellectual, and the workings of power as a feature of national, colonial, and imperial politics? And what can a critical study of Said’s work teach us about not just 20th-century intellectual history, but also the nature of politics, knowledge, and power today?
This course will closely explore Said’s readings and uses of Gramsci, contrasting them with those advanced by some of his intellectual and political peers, including the historian Ranajit Guha and the cultural theorist Stuart Hall. We will investigate Gramscian themes across Said’s work, including: the relation between culture and politics; the making and unmaking of oppositional intellectuals; the complex interweaving of culture, nation and imperialism. Throughout, we will explore with Said and Gramsci what it means to theorise at the scale of the world while remaining fiercely attentive to particularity and its demands. As we go, we will accompany our interpretations of Said with selections from Gramsci’s writings, from his essay on the “southern question” to the notes on the intellectual in his Prison Notebooks.
Course Schedule
Wednesday, 6:30-9:30pm ETJuly 08 — July 29, 2026
4 weeks
$335.00
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