Introduction

This special issue of Notebooks did not materialise out of thin air, as it were, but originated in a conference, Rethinking Gramsci, organised in Montreal from 24–26 May 2023. The conference, for its part, did not emerge out of nowhere either but, rather, arose organically from a specific set of circumstances and responded to a concrete set of concerns. There were, in particular, three interrelated contexts that determined our engagement with the legacy of Gramsci and the subsequent character of this issue of Notebooks: the developments in the geopolitical and socio-historical context of the early 2020s; contemporary Marxist theory; and the more limited field of scholarship dedicated to the life and work of Antonio Gramsci. For the purposes of clarity of exposition, I will proceed from the most general to the most specific.