Before the Southern question: Gramsci, Socialist Lebanon, and the militant intellectual

Since the appearance of the first Arabic translations of Gramsci’s works at the beginning of the 1970s, the epistemology of the Sardinian Marxist has represented a constant source of inspiration for the scholars and intellectuals of and from the Middle East. The early Gramsci’s translations in Arabic were published in 1970 and 1971 as meta-selections from coeval compendia appeared in English and French, whose circulation had directly or indirectly reached the Eastern shore of the Mediterranean. In both cases, the translations were realized by members of the collective of intellectuals Socialist Lebanon, a formation of the so-called Arab New Lefts born in reaction to the disillusionment against Arab nationalism, as part of a broader work of militant translation to search and spread heterodox interpretations of Marxism through which revivify the project of radical emancipation of the Arab societies. By relating the selection rationales of the early Arabic translations of Gramsci with the broader ‘problem-spaces’ that were informing these New Left militants’ political imaginary and intellectual practices, this chapter aims at historicizing the entry path through which the Sardinian thinker became a fundamental reference of the Arab political thought.