Abstract

The present paper offers a postcolonial ‘conversion’ of Gramsci’s linguistic approach to political and cultural practice and theory. The ethnolinguistic and sociocultural divide which Gramsci focuses on in relation to the question of Southern Italy reemerges in our times, in the context of the globalized postcolonial and migratory conditions in the Western metropoles. Particularly in France, where the memory of the Algerian war of independence is still alive, the established hegemony is confronted with the presence of a North African migratory population and the resulting presence of Arabic language varieties. This situation represents a permanent provocation to the hegemonic linguistic and sociocultural codes and it reveals the anachronistic character of the notion of national identity itself. In the light of the neo-Gramscian “subalternist” perspective, the disidentificatory potential of this complex contact situation can be identified as the key to a postcolonial conception of a counter-hegemonic project within the framework of a revolutionary socialist strategy for the 21st century.