Edward Said and Antonio Gramsci in Counterpoint

Edward Said’s thought continues to shape analysis of the legacies of colonialism. Among the diverse inspirations for Said’s ‘secular’ and, later, ‘democratic criticism’ (1983, 2004) is the work of Antonio Gramsci. Gramsci’s concepts of hegemony and subalternity, his reflections on the role of intellectuals in society, and his discussions of the spatial relationship between culture and power, inform Said’s ‘contrapuntal’ approach, which reads the cultural archive as a polyphony of ‘intertwined and overlapping histories’ (1993). While Said’s regard for Gramsci’s writings is well known, the precise nature of this theoretical encounter has been less frequently illuminated. This article investigates Said’s sustained engagement with the ideas of Gramsci and their multi-faceted influence on his work. Reciprocally, it suggests that Said’s problematic uncovers critical aspects of Gramsci’s thought. It hypothesises that Said’s ‘troubling’ contrapuntal reading of the multiple discrepant historical experiences of empire implies an integral approach understood such that it prefigures the recent season of Gramsci studies. The latter has been marked by a historical-philological method, which treats hegemony within Gramsci’s thought as one pole in a hegemonic-subaltern axis and is attentive to the concerns of a ‘living philology’ resonant with Said’s unorthodox humanist affiliations. Working towards a reconstruction of the encounter between Said and Gramsci across texts, this article gleans Said’s entanglement with this inter-war Marxist thinker as it is diffused across his body of writings, decoding the relation of ‘critical consciousness’ to Said’s ‘contrapuntal’ approach. It places Said’s generative framework in conversation with Gramsci’s conception of the ‘philosophy of praxis,’ cross-pollinating insights from recent Gramsci studies with scholarship addressing Said’s unresolved, dramatic methodology. Conversely, it aims to clarify the discontinuities between Said’s thought and Gramsci’s, discussing underexplored turns in this ‘travelling theory’ that contribute to non-Eurocentric frameworks for addressing present ‘worldly’ challenges facing postcolonial and critical thought.