Intersecting oppressions; intersecting struggles: Race, class and subalternity

This article offers intersectional theories of racism another way to think about Gramsci’s work; it will explore how Gramsci operationalizes the category of subaltern groups. It begins by briefly reviewing how Gramsci’s work is discussed in contemporary theoretical approaches to racism in the work of Kimberlé Crenshaw, Patricia Hill Collins, Michael Omi and Howard Winant and Stuart Hall. It will stress important similarities regarding the relationship between structural and social forces, political ideologies and consciousness. It will note how both ‘intersectionality’ and ‘articulation’ (one variant of this concept discussed by Hall) show how racism can be amplified through the overlapping or overdetermination of identities, representations and societal effects. It continues by exploring how racism was overdetermined in the Italian national context during the time that Gramsci had lived (and relates it to contemporary theoretical frameworks that organize our understandings of race, racialization and racism). The article then explores how subalternity has been theorized away from the context in which Gramsci employed the term and interpreted, instead, from the twin perspectives of absolute domination and radical autonomy. The article concludes by reading subalternity alongside of race, class and as a substantive cultural question and, in addition, a question of strategy and political organization.