Antonio Gramsci Translated by Pasquale Verdicchio Contents A hundred years after it was written, Antonio Gramsci’s The Southern Question continues to shine a light on our world today. In The Southern Question and many of his subsequent writings in The Prison Notebooks, Gramsci elaborated a notable series of observations and commentary on Italian and world issues. Among them are the relationship between the city and the countryside (North/South); the potentially revolutionary alliance between Northern workers and Southern peasants; the role and position of intellectuals within the narrative spaces provided by the interaction of diverse polities; the variegated nature and processes of hegemony; and questions of cultural formation and propagation. Testimony to The Southern Question’s continued importance is Edward Said’s observation that ‘under-read and under-analysed [it] goes beyond its tactical relevance to Italian politics in 1926. [It is] a prelude to The Prison Notebooks in which [Gramsci] gave, as his towering counterpart Lukács did not, paramount focus to the territorial, spatial, geographical foundations of social life’. The purpose of this new edition, with a fresh translation, is to demonstrate how The Southern Question is relevant to discussions on state formation, diasporas, and potentially revolutionary alliances in varied contexts, from Central and South America to the Indian sub-continent. Publication LeftWord Books