Newsletter - International Gramsci Society

A Note on Edward W. Said’s Culture and Imperialism
Edward W. Said’s latest work, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Knopf, 1993) is
indebted to Gramsci in several respects, even if less obviously than The World, the Text and
the Critic (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1983). Gramsci unfinished essay on the
southern question is one of Said’s points of reference as a work that sets the stage for the
critical attention given in the Prison Notebooks to the “territorial, spatial and geographical
foundations of life.” Said’s analyses of a wide range of literary texts, which he uses as
sources for understanding the dynamics of politics and culture in their connections with the
whole imperialist enterprise, can be read as fulfillments of the historical materialist premises
outlined in fragmentary form in both the Prison Notebooks and the Letters From Prison.
Unlike Gramsci, Said does not adhere explicitly to Marxism, nor does he identify
himself with any one political current of movement. Nevertheless, underlying his work is a set
of theoretical principles and practical stances that are certainly in harmony with a Gramscian
world view. Certain tensions in Said’s relationship to Marxism have been noted by the Indian
Marxist Aijaz Ahmad, who argues in his book In Theory (New York & London: Verso, 1992)
that Said has not really assimilated the materialist and revolutionary principles undergirding
Gramsci’s work. Ahmad frames his critique of Said within the boundaries of a rather strict
interpretation of Marxism in his commitment to socialism as the foundation on which to build
a genuinely oppositional culture. He is skeptical of Said’s foregrounding of anti-imperialism
and the principle of “liberatory” politics that avoids explicitly socialist partisanship.
What is of interest to readers of this Newsletter is that Gramsci continues to occupy an
important place in the cultural, political and ideological debates of the “post-communist”
era. His ideas and methodological innovations continue to provide such thinkers as Said,
Ahmad, and Cornel West with insights into the natuire of contemporary reality, despite the
recent defeats suffered by the countries of existing socialism.
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Frank Rosengarten