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Description:

Gramsci's "Some Aspects of the Southern Question" - an unfinished work produced just prior to his incarceration - provides the foundation for his lifelong intellectual project. In the "Southern Question" Gramsci plots a path towards socialist revolution through the political alignment of southern agricultural workers (peasants) and northern wage workers (proletariats). What began as a rumination on the 'South' in 1926, by 1934, after a decade in prison, grew into a full articulation on subaltern classes and subaltern social groups. In "On the Margins of History (The History of Subaltern Social Groups)", or Notebook 25, Gramsci's focus on the history and relations of "subaltern social groups" reveals a strategy for a history of societal transformation, and thus a political strategy for transformation. Through an analysis of their "economic, political, and social positions; the stages of their development in history; their significance in cultural forms; how they are represented in literature" he concluded that the liberation of subaltern groups…"requires a transformation of the state and its oppressive social relations." These works analyze the factors of subaltern marginalization, but also the "elements which prevent groups from overcoming their marginalization" (Green 2002), laying the foundation for a different, radical future.

Taking these texts together, we can start to discern Gramsci's contribution to the production of difference when considering processes of capital accumulation through his analysis on the South. For instance, his writings on Italy, and on the characterization of Southerners in particular, highlight how processes of marginalization are grounded in processes of uneven development. His refusal to separate geography from ideology and geography from race and class prioritized a geographical analytic where the "South"--which can be extended to other southern contexts-- can be understood as a geographic imaginary constructed to shield the social, political-economic conditions that created it (Buttigieg 1975, Green 2021). Said (1978), Hall (1986), and Gilmore (2002), among others, build from this aspect of Gramsci's work, analyzing particular historical forms of racism (through the production of difference) in order to undress regional unevenness and uneven power relations. Thus, by revisiting the Southern Question text, this CFP asks what can geographers pull from subaltern geographies of connection today? As Hart and Kipfer note, Gramsci's revolutionary praxis refused "to make categorical distinctions between different – economic, social, cultural, psychological, political – aspects of life" (2012). Thinking through this idea, and with other scholars who work on Gramsci, we ask: how can this revolutionary imperative inform our research today?

This session seeks to build on this rich legacy of scholars and beyond-either theoretical, conceptual, and methodological-that prioritize a thinking and rethinking of what Gramsci's "Some Aspects of the Southern Question" means today in critical human geography. We seek to critically and creatively examine the following:

Uneven development in the ‘South’
Southern Question/Postcolonial intersections
Thinking through and with the ‘Southern Question’
Race and southern questions
Gramsci’s understanding of history or the role of history (historical materialism) and subalternity in critical human geography
The production of difference in capital accumulation
The ‘Southern Question’ in Italy today and beyond
What can the ‘Southern Question’ offer to geography today?
Southern Questions/Agrarian Questions

Non-Presenting Participants