The Southern Question and Subaltern Social Groups and Classes

This essay reflects on Antonio Gramsci’s Subaltern Social Groups: A Critical Edition of Prison Notebook 25 (Columbia University Press, 2021), edited and translated by the late Joseph A. Buttigieg and Marcus E. Green. While Gramsci’s concept of subaltern groups has long inspired scholars of cultural studies, geography, subaltern studies, and political theory, this work has drawn on a relatively small selection of Gramsci’s prison writings. This first complete English translation of Gramsci’s writings on subaltern groups and classes represents a major turning point in Gramscian studies, showing how Gramsci provided important “methodological criteria” for analyzing race and class in specific conjunctures. Gramsci’s insights about subaltern groups and classes as well as the southern question can be “translated” to confront the current conjuncture.