Hegemony without hegemony: Gramsci, Guha and post-Western Marxism

This chapter focuses on Ranajit Guha’s critical reformulation of Gramsci’s theory of hegemony for understanding colonial state formation and defends his thesis of an ‘autonomous domain of subaltern politics’. Reading Ranajit Guha’s masterwork, Dominance without Hegemony (1997), in relation to Jacques Rancière’s historiographical theorization in The Names of History (1994), this chapter articulates the constellation of a historiographical narrative poetics of contradiction in Guha’s engagement with Gramsci’s problematic in order to historicize the concept of hegemony for our present. The chapter argues that Guha’s concept of an ‘autonomous domain of subaltern politics’ is both relevant and critical necessary for a pluriversal, post-Western Marxist theory and historiography, and that the domain of the social reproduction of means of subsistence, in its separation from the formal domain of capitalist commodity production, constitutes an autonomous domain of subaltern class politics, global in scale.