ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how during the Cold War Antonio Gramsci’s writings became crucial for Italian writers and filmmakers in their engagement with decolonization. The chapter is framed by a reading of Gramsci’s notes on education, language learning, universality, and translatability. Gramsci’s understanding of philosophical worldliness and the translatability of universal constructs gave rise to his reception in anticolonial thought. For Gramsci, language learning and an education in the humanities were conducive to social mobility and class consciousness. Gramsci believed that learning how to decipher what Marx called the “social hieroglyph” of capital could clear the way for an alternative conception of worldliness capable of supplanting the dominant culture. The chapter then goes on to show how Gramsci’s writings shaped Pier Paolo Pasolini’s encounter with anticolonial politics. The question the chapter puts forward is to what extent Gramsci’s thought was translatable into the discursive context of Italian Third-Worldism. It argues that Gramsci’s own understanding of worldliness and translatability, as well as his aesthetic of the unfinished Notebook, complicated these discursive translations of his work.
