Ascendant groups develop from subaltern to hegemonic status through acquiring autonomy and allies

Evidence

Numerous principles of historical research can be established by examining the innovatory forces which led the national Risorgimento in Italy: these forces took power and united in the modern Italian State, in struggle against specific other forces and helped by specific auxiliaries or allies. In order to become a State, they had to subordinate or eliminate the former and win the active or passive assent of the latter. A study of how these innovatory forces developed, from subaltern groups to hegemonic and dominant groups, must therefore seek out and identify the phases through which they acquired: 1. autonomy vis-a-vis the enemies they had to defeat, and 2. support from the groups which actively or passively assisted them; for this entire process was historically necessary before they could unite in the form of a State. It is precisely by these two yardsticks that the level of historical and political consciousness which the innovatory forces progressively attained in the various phases can be measured—and not simply by the yardstick of their separation from the formerly dominant forces. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 419

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the two-yardstick method for measuring a group’s transition from subaltern to hegemonic: autonomy from enemies plus support from assistants, not merely separation from dominant forces.
• XREF: This is the core scaffolding concept — subaltern becoming hegemonic — that Islamophobia readings will map onto how colonized/racialized groups are constructed before they resist. — connects to: A group defined by an outsider’s look cannot achieve true autonomy — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 505; Working for the subaltern means their insertion into citizenship and loss of subaltern space — Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean, The Spivak Reader: Selected Works of…, 2430