International Gramsci Society Newsletter
Number 5 (November, 1995): 35-36 < prev | toc | next >  

Miscellaneous

Hiroshi Matsuda informs us that the Kyoto Gramsci Society is currently working on two major projects: (1) a new book on Gramsci, civil society, and culture; and (2) a translation into Japanese of the most important prison notebooks, including Notebooks 13 (Notes on Machiavelli's Politics), 19 (The Italian Risorgimento), and 22 (Americanism and Fordism).

In the last issue of the IGS Newsletter we misprinted the title of E. San Juan Jr.'s book: Hegemony and Strategies of Transgression: Essays in Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature (Albany, N. Y. : State University of New York Press, 1994). Another recent publication by E. San Juan Jr. that makes use of Gramscian categories (in this case, the "national-popular") is his essay "On the Limits of 'Postcolonial' Theory: Trespassing Letters from the 'Third World'" in Ariel: A Review of International English Literature, vol. 26, no. 3 (July 1995), pp. 89-115. This past spring, Epifanio San Juan was conducting university seminars in northern Italy. He was interviewed by newspaper of Trento, L'Adige for its issue of 15 May 1995. Among other things, the interviewer asked: "Perché nei suoi scritti è spesso citato Gramsci?" San Juan Jr.'s response: "Le analisi di Gramsci sono particolarmente attuali perché i rapporti fra nord e sud Italia non sono molto differenti da quelli esistenti fra i Paesi industrializzati e quello del Terzo mondo. Significativi sono inoltre i suoi richiami all'importanza della cultura nei processi di indipendenza dei paesi economicamente meno sviluppati e alla funzione degli intellettuali per il consolidamento di una cultura popolare.

On 27 April 1995, the Department of Philosophy of the University of Bari held a colloquium on "Gramsci in Europa e in America" which used for its point of departure the book with the same title edited by Antonio Santucci and published earlier this year by Laterza. The speakers at the Bari colloquium included Roberto Finelli and Francesco Fistetti, in addition to Antonio Santucci.

The Circolo Universitario Rifondazione Communista and the Associazione Culturale Punto Rossa organized a symposium on "Antonio Gramsci: egemonia e rivoluzione nella crisi organica" that was held in the afetrnoon of 30 May 1995 in the building of the Faculty of Letters of the University of Bologna. The speakers were Antonio Santucci, Alberto Burgio, and Joseph Buttigieg.

"Unveiling the Mechanisms of Power: Gramsci's Analysis of Civil Society" was the title of the paper that Joseph Buttigieg delivered at the IX Congresso Internazionale of the Associazione Professori d'Italiano of South Africa. The congress which had for its topic "Power and Italian Culture and Literature" was held on 13-16 September 1995 at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg.

Renate Holub of the University of California at Berkeley has presented the following papers: "Gramsci and Adorno," in March 1995 for the Program in Political and Social Theory, York University, Toronto; "Multikulturalismen: Eine Kritik von Gramsci," in June 1995 at the University of Potsdam in Germany; and "Differential Pragmatics" (elaborating the concept she outlined at the end of her book Antonio Gramsci: Beyond Marxism and Postmodernism) in September 1995 to the International Association of Women in Philosophy in Vienna. In addition, Renate Holub conducted [END PAGE 35] a seminar at the University of California at Santa Cruz, in January 1995, on "Intellectuals and Hegemony: Julien Benda, Karl Mannheim, and Antonio Gramsci."

Diana Cicely Coben has kindly provided us with the Abstract of her doctoral thesis Radical Heroes: Gramsci, Freire and the Liberal Tradition in Adult Education (1992):

In the 1970s and 1980s many radical adult educators in the United Kingdom turned to the work of Antonio Gramsci and Paulo Freire for theoretical insights to support new initiatives in the education of adults. The thesis considers the significance of the work of Gramsci and Freire in Britain in the period following the publication of the Russell and Alexander reports.

The thesis begins by charting the origins of the dominant tradition in British adult education, the Liberal Tradition, starting with an analysis of concepts of liberal adult education and outlining the struggle for education and for emancipation by working class groupings from the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. The thesis then traces the develpment, in the twentieth century, of the Liberal Tradition, with its emphasis on education for personal development and social purpose as opposed to vocational education. The origins and development of radical critiques of liberal adult education in the period up to 1990 are outlined and some conceptualisations of the relationship between liberal and radical adult education are analysed. Freire's analysis of the transformative role of adult education in liberating the oppressed is considered, as is Gramsci's concept of politics as educative, his writing on hegemony, the role of intellectuals and the nature of education in a revolutionary process. The relationship between Gramsci, Freire and the Liberal Tradition is explored, and the thesis considers the appropriateness of the emergence of Gramsci and Freire as "Radical Heroes" in radical critiques and developments of the Liberal Tradition in adult education.

Diana Coben presented her Ph.D. thesis to the Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Kent at Canterbury, U.K. A book based on this dissertation will be published by Garland Publishing Inc., New York, in 1996/7.

L'Unità of 5 August 1995 published an interview with Ursula Apitzsch, under the headline "Gramsci e Tanja, le emozioni e la società civile." In the course of the interview, Ursula Apitzsch discusses briefly an Italo-German project involving, in addition to Apitzsch herself, Mimma Paulesu Quercioli, Aldo Natoli, and Peter Kammerer. They plan to publish an edition of Gramsci's letters from prison that will attempt to emphasise the "private" aspects of Gramsci's thought. In the first volume they plan to gather Gramsci's letters to his wife Giulia, while the second and third volumes will "reconstruct the constant dialogue that Gramsci had with his sister-in-law Tania Schucht."   ^ return to top ^ < prev | toc | next >