Censorship forced Gramsci’s political commentary into opaque, allusive form in prison

Evidence

Gramsci was least able to write openly about in prison, with the result that those passages of the Notebooks where he discusses fascism, or communist strategy, are necessarily opaque and allusive. In order to have a basis from which to interpret these passages, it is essential to understand the political experience upon which the Prison Notebooks are a comment and of which they are the fruit. In a more general sense, too, the entire intellectual enterprise represented by the Notebooks can only be evaluated in relation to Gramsci’s prior political experience; and only a grasp of that experience makes it possible to distinguish between the development and the critical reappraisal of earlier views. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 242

Categorization

• QUESTION: This textual-vs-contextual reading principle matters for the Islamophobia toolkit too: how much of a theorist’s meaning is encoded in the constraints under which they wrote? Worth carrying forward.
• XREF: The idea that prison censorship shaped the Notebooks’ opacity echoes how other exiled/imprisoned thinkers (e.g., Ibn Khaldun, exile writers) encode critique allusively — relevant to conditions under which colonial and anti-colonial theory gets produced.