Saturday, December 2, 2023
A conference at UC Berkeley co-hosted by the Trinity Social Justice Initiative, the Department of Geography and Townsend Center for the Humanities, UC Berkeley, and the International Gramsci Society
Italian Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci developed his spatio-historical method of conjunctural analysis during the rise of fascism in Italy. He sought to understand the relations among political, economic, ideological, and military forces that were giving rise to this emergent movement and regime. Gramsci’s conjunctural analysis has become newly relevant to our own moment. Our conjuncture has been marked by multiple colliding crises, from relentless racism and vigilantism, gender violence, climate chaos, social polarization, structural unemployment, mass migration, resurgent militarism, the rise of the far right across the world, and a crisis of hegemony and for capitalism on a global scale. The challenge for scholars at present is to comprehend Gramsci’s conjunctural analysis in his own time while also “translating” his insights to confront the crises of our own.
This one-day, in-person symposium, hosted by the International Gramsci Society, the Trinity Social Justice Institute, The Townsend Center for the Humanities, and the UC Berkeley Department of Geography considers historical, spatial, and theoretical provocations posed by the Gramscian tradition in order to advance political and social theory for the present. In dialogue with scholars from across the disciplines, we will consider how we might produce spaces for conjunctural analysis and theoretical production adequate to the current conjuncture.
9:30am | Welcome
- Michael Watts (UC Berkeley)
9:45am – 11:00am | Panel 1—Gramsci’s Relevance
- Marcus E. Green (Pasadena City College), “Gramsci and Subaltern Social Groups and Classes”
- Renate Holub (UC Berkeley), “Gramsci in the North-American Worlds”
- Gillian Hart (UC Berkeley), “Gramsci in McCone Hall”
- Chair: Jordan T. Camp (Trinity College)
11:00am – 11:30am | Break
11:30am – 12:30pm | Panel 2—Borders, Migration, and Uneven Development in the Mediterranean
- Ilaria Giglioli (University of San Francisco), “Bordering and Solidarity Across Multiple Souths”
- Lauren Pearson (UC Berkeley), “Many Small Fires: Uneven Development in Mezzogiorno Italy”
- Chair: Camilla Hawthorne (UC Santa Cruz)
12:30pm – 1:30pm | Lunch
1:30pm – 2:45pm | Panel 3—Geographies of Racial Capitalism and Imperialism
- Jennifer J. Casolo (Ch’orti’-Maya Pluriversity, University of Antwerp, Nitlapan Universidad Centroamericana), “Gramsci, Indigenous Praxis, and the Southern Question”
- Sharad Chari (UC Berkeley), “Gramsci at Sea”
- Jennifer Greenburg (University of Sheffield), “Gramsci, Imperial Feminism, and U.S. Hegemony”
- Chair: Cihan Tugal (UC Berkeley)
Jennifer Casolo delivered her presentation remotely, which you can watch below.
2:45pm – 3:00pm | Break
3:00pm – 4:15pm | Panel 4—Law, the State, and Social Movements
- Christina Heatherton (Trinity College), “Gramsci, Flores Magón, and the Question of Alliances”
- Zachary Levenson (Florida International University), “Gramsci’s Integral State”
- John Whitlow (CUNY Law), “Gramsci, the Law, and the Real Estate State”
- Chair: Dylan Riley (UC Berkeley)
**Due to technical difficulties, the video for this panel is not available.**
4:15pm – 4:30pm | Break
4:30pm – 5:45pm | Panel 5—Reading Gramsci in the South
- Mary Jirmanus Saba (UC Berkeley), “Mahdi Amel and Hegemony in Colonial Contexts”
- Ayyaz Mallick (University of Liverpool), “Times and Spaces of Hegemony in Gramsci and Fanon”
- Jordan T. Camp (Trinity College), “Southern Questions: W.E.B. Du Bois, Antonio Gramsci, and the Geography of Fascism”
- Chair: Michael Burawoy (UC Berkeley)
**Due to technical difficulties, the video for this panel is not available.**
6:00pm | Reception
