Events

Travelling with Gramsci: Capital and the Afterlives of Empire in Egypt and the Middle East

Hosted by the Middle East Centre

Research Centres Meeting Suite, 9th Floor, Pankhurst House, Clement's Inn, WC2A 2AZ

Speaker

Dr Sara Salem

Dr Sara Salem

LSE

Chair

Prof John Chalcraft

Prof John Chalcraft

LSE

gramsci-gabriele-cancedda-800-600

Listen to the podcast of this event here

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 theory’ allows for both productive conversations as well as challenges to Eurocentric accounts of Marxist theory, and sheds light on some of the afterlives of empire in the Middle East.

Sara Salem (@saramsalem) is Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at LSE. Her main research interests include political sociology, postcolonial studies, Marxist theory, feminist theory, and global histories of empire and imperialism. Salem is an editor at the journal Historical Materialism.

John Chalcraft is Professor of Middle East History and Politics in the Department of Government at LSE and leads the Social Movements and Popular Mobilisation in the MENA Research Netwrok

Join the conversation on Twitter using #LSEEgypt

About the LSE Middle East Centre

The LSE Middle East Centre (@LSEMiddleEast) builds on LSE's long engagement with the Middle East and North Africa and provides a central hub for the wide range of research on the region carried out at LSE.

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Image: Antonio Gramsci by Gabriele Cancedda. Source: Gramscimania