A Pedagogy of the Subalterns: Gramsci and the Groups ‘on the margins of history’

Abstract

In the 1980s, a group of South Asian scholars pioneered Subaltern Studies drawing on one of Gramsci's most famous and used categories: the subaltern. This chapter attempts a philological analysis of Gramsci's work to show how the use of this term has been at times incorrect, in part because of the lack, until recently, of complete translations of Gramsci's writings. Subaltern Studies' interpretation has arguably oriented Gramsci's notion of the subaltern to the ethical and political needs of an emancipatory project. This does not completely undermine the fruitfulness of a scholarship capable of using a concept which had been previously neglected in defining marginal individuals without binding them to either an economistic or a culturalistic interpretation. Therefore, even though the Gramscian notion of subalternity can be traced back to the lessons of the twentieth century, it also legitimately belongs to the lexicon of a contemporary, militant pedagogy, aware of rights, minorities and marginality. The aim of this chapter is to consider the pedagogical implications of this notion. While elaborating a methodology intended to retrace the history of the subalterns, Gramsci suggested new paths of emancipation from past educational models, and, stressing the subaltern's incapability of a spontaneous liberation from their condition of minority, he advocated an intervention (political and pedagogic) of conscious direction necessary for the intellectual progress of the mass.