Resumen de Politics, Power, and Culture Gramsci, Milani, Freire, Nyerere, Giroux and the politics of cultural representation, interpretation and contestation
This thesis is intended to demonstrate how, in different contexts and circumstances, politics, education, culture and power are inextricably combined. It is intended to give flesh to Antonio Gramsci's argument, to foreground a key source of inspiration for my ideas concerning cultural production and dissemination, and the first figure to be discussed in-depth (the next chapter), that every relationship of hegemony is an educational relationship. These concepts - power, culture, and education - are once again discussed in their broader contexts and as capillary (Colin Gordon, in Foucault, 1980: 255). They spread beyond the institutions that are prima facie and simplistically regarded as their sole agencies. Education and culture are used by Gramsci in the statement regarding hegemony, highlighting the consensual and repressive bases of power, in their widest sense possible, involving formal, informal, and non-formal sources and a strong degree of interaction between them. Their clear demarcation is done for purely heuristic purposes. There is a considerable degree of interaction among them. The complexity of their interrelation mirrors the complexity of life itself. One does not exist exclusive of the other. The last two chapters prior to the Epilogue will strongly suggest this. Everything is integral in my conceptualisation in this thesis. Gramsci, himself, as I show in the next chapter, uses the term ' integral' regarding the State, despite his acute and often meticulous analysis of its component parts. Cultural production, including education, therefore cannot be isolated from interactional and overarching social structures and challenges. They are not independent variables. They therefore contribute to processes of change but cannot bring about change on their own and, in Marx's and Engels' words, in The 18th Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, not under conditions of their own making. This is a recurring consideration throughout the various chapters, one expressed in many ways by the chosen authors. These thinkers/ activists are not unique in this and their relevance to this thesis. I confined myself to engaging with those whose oeuvre I studied best. There are many others of great relevance but whom I have not studied in similar depth to be confident of dealing with at a similar level. There are others about whom I cowrote and published but I do not have copyright authorisation to reproduce in this work. These include Ada Gobetti and GabrielaMistral. I suggest the reader of this thesis consults Paolo Vittoria and my book containing the relevant chapters, together with those on Amilcar Cabral, the Movimento Trabalhadores Rurais sem Terra (MST) and the Feminism of Difference, the last mentioned also focusing on Italy
