This collection of essays, edited by Roberto M. Dainotto and Fredric Jameson, is a timely and valuable contribution to cultural studies, political and social theory, postcolonial studies, as well as generally to the history of the Left and particularly to the history of Marxism. The book brings Gramsci’s thought into actuality at a time when the Left, both in the United States and internationally, is trying to redefine its profile and goals and reposition itself in a post–Cold War world in reaction to globalization, the effects of neoliberalism, and the attempts of the right wing to appeal to the electorate through the rejection of modernity and calls for the revival of an idealized past. The book situates Gramsci’s conception of politics in a diverse historical, cultural, and political context that ranges from Italy and Europe to the United States, from Latin America to Asia (China), and to the Arab world.

As Dainotto points out in the introduction to the book, the goal of the edited volume is “to present some ‘differential pragmatics’…through which Gramsci is approached…by eminent scholars, working on different geographies and from different disciplinary perspectives, always keeping in mind that any presence of Gramsci in the world, any political use of Gramsci is in fact mediated by the ways in which his words have been ‘introduced,’” which means that “the philological question…is a political question” (p. 13). What gradually emerges in reading the chapters of the book is a creative and inspiring interpretation of Gramsci’s legacy, which deprovincializes Marxism and offers an image of it not as a doctrine, but rather as a way of thinking and as a method that can adapt to the specifics of a cultural and political context. The goal, as Dainotto observes in the introduction, “is not to affirm some kind of ‘purist’ version of Gramsci, or to pit ‘philology’ against ‘political use,’ but rather to return to his texts in order to bring into relief possibilities and limits of Gramscian thought in cultural politics and political culture within a global context” (p. 14). The goal is achieved through a critical and constructive dialogue between Gramsci’s work and the work of thinkers from Latin America, such as José Carlos Mariátegui (Peru); from China, such as Lu Xun; and from the Arab world, such as Edward Said.

Two themes emerge as the main organizers of the book’s structure: Gramsci as a theorist of modernity and Gramsci’s conception of revolutionary agency, particularly the role of the organic and critical intellectual in articulating the consciousness of subaltern groups in their struggle for liberation. Several essays in the book challenge the idea of “modernity as an intra-European phenomenon” (p. 194). They propose, instead, a modernity that is contested, plural, complex, and hybrid and is able to adapt to and integrate local and traditional elements; these characteristics explain modernity’s stratified temporal structure, in which “the present is never identical to itself and transparent as a fixed temporal perspective, but rather always an ensemble of fractured and heterogeneous combining of encounters between different times” (p. 148).

In his chapter, Alberto Burgio reconstructs a Gramscian picture of modernity that retains premodern elements (pp. 44–45) and combines progressive and regressive forces at its core. This approach to modernity allows Gramsci to formulate a general theory of crises and conflicts that distinguishes between occasional and organic crises. One consequence of Gramsci’s theory is to point to the ability of capitalist modernity to endure and defend itself even against organic crises, which require the creation of new structures, and thus to provide strategic advice for labor forces so that they do not misguide and waste their energies in their class struggle by mistaking an organic (real) crisis for an occasional one (p. 58).

R. A. Judy’s essay discusses Gramsci’s approach to the “Negro Question”: it articulates the complex and almost paradoxical position of African American intellectuals in the global expansion of America, particularly, in relationship with the African masses. This is a position that is (historically) entangled with the logic of “America as a perpetual and violent pattern of globalizing” whose “varieties always move toward the consolidation of intelligence into practical political-economic thought” (p. 177), thus reducing all “intellectual energy to the solving of practical problems” (p. 174).

An important implication of Judy’s essay ties into the second theme that organizes the book: the role of intellectuals in the revolutionary process and the responsibility they bear in the process of modernization. As evidenced by Judy’s discussion of Gramsci’s approach to the position of African American intellectuals, it seems that, in their fight against racism and against capitalist modernity, intellectuals need not only practice criticism in Foucault’s sense (revelatory of how the agents of change are themselves the products of the power relations they resist). They also need to offer a vision for the future of a society, the product of a creative imagination— consequently acting as transformative agents of a society’s cultural values and political reason.

Expanding on this last function of intellectuals, Peter D. Thomas argues in his contribution to the volume that Gramsci’s idea of a modern prince (and implicitly the role of the political party) can be interpreted as a work of imagination, a dramatic staging of the people’s “own really existing capacities, above all for self-liberation and self-governance” (p. 25), and, more importantly, as “an expansive revolutionary process on movement” (p. 31). Cesare Casarino reconstructs in his essay a Gramscian notion of political intuition, which, like artistic intuition, establishes connections between apparently unrelated things and can immerse itself in the life of the object (p. 82). Political intuition thus understood as “passionate knowledge” (p. 90) and creative imagination is essential for the individual or collective leader because “truly producing relations among unrelated phenomena is tantamount to at once realizing our interests, generating our passions, and moving us to actions” (p. 91).

In line with this argument, which emphasizes the importance of imagination, intuition, and compassion in the process of revolutionary change, several chapters in the book link success in organizing new projects and providing new visions in the process of modernizing societies with the ability of intellectuals to connect with the people. As Cosimo Zene points out in his essay, the “effort to become an integral historian or a collective thinker is not a given but [is] always in the making through the continuous dialogue between the people and the intellectual” (p. 136). As a result of this dialogue, the organic intellectual can better understand and refine, for example, the role of religion in the life of a subaltern group. Although religion can, indeed, be an instrument for keeping subaltern groups pacified, it can also be a “means to gain self-consciousness by the subaltern” (p. 131) and of “overcoming subalternity” (p. 136).

One question the reader is left with, at the end of the book, refers to the logic that guided the choice of the “differential pragmatics” that account for the reading of Gramsci and for his introduction to different worldwide audiences. As someone coming from Eastern Europe, I wonder why the book did not dedicate an essay to the way Gramsci’s work was read in the former communist bloc. I know from my own experience in communist Romania that, along with Lukács and Althusser, Gramsci was read as an alternative form of Marxism and as resistance to the dogmatism of the Romanian Communists, close to the model of the critical intellectual that Pu Wang’s essay in the book constructs through the portrait of Lu Xuan. Moreover, given their struggle today to articulate a convincing and vigorous Left, it would have been illuminating if the book would have also dedicated a chapter to the way Gramsci has been reappropriated in Eastern and Central Europe after the fall of communism.

Finally, Michael Denning argues in one of the book’s essays that, despite its historical lack of interest in the work of Gramsci, “the US Left does need a new version of ‘the art and science of politics’ that Gramsci pioneered” (p. 162). One crucial aspect of this art of politics that the US Left needs would make possible a transformation of the dominant conceptions of the world that exist today in American society without “reaching for the easy answer” (p. 163) and without falling prey to infallibility. If Denning is right, then in the political culture of today’s world, where both the Right and the Left seem to reach out for easy answers, clichés, and stock phrases, there is a question to ask: What could Gramsci teach the US Left (and not only) about the responsibility organic intellectuals bear to create a social ethos of criticism and transformation that keeps at bay the tendency to claim infallibility and reach for the easy answer, which seems to lure some forms of contemporary activism?