Lse Middle East Centre Podcasts

Stuart Hall once wrote that we mustn’t use Gramsci like ‘an Old Testament prophet who, at the correct moment, will offer us the consoling and appropriate quotation.’ Instead, we must ‘think’ our problems in a Gramscian way. What would it mean to ‘think’ some of the problems facing Egypt and the broader Middle East in such a way, and what are some of the challenges and productive encounters this might produce? This talk looks at how Gramsci has ‘travelled’ to the Middle East, and what made this travel possible. In particular, Sara Salem traces some of the ways in which Gramsci’s concepts have been thought with in contexts such as Egypt, and argues that the productive debates that have emerged around this suggest a continuing usefulness of Gramsci for scholars of the region. More importantly, Salem also argues that the particularities of capitalism in the colony and postcolony pose important challenges to prominent interpretations of Gramsci’s work. She suggests that thinking about Gramsci through ‘traveling t