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Article: Redemption through violence: white mobs and black citizenship in Albion Tourgee's A Fool's Errand.(Critical Essay)
- Article from:
- The Southern Literary Journal
- Article date:
- September 22, 2002
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2002 University of North Carolina Press. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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"The modern prince ... can only be an organism, a complex element of society in which a collective will, which has already been recognized and has to some extent asserted itself in action, begins to take concrete form."
--Antonio Gramsci, The Prison Notebooks (circa 1929-1935)
Although Gramsci here discusses how the Communist Party must go about organizing its base of power, his analysis serves as an apt description of how the "modern prince" of white mob violence expressed a collective will in the South after Reconstruction and well into the twentieth century. Gramsci provides an appropriate epigraph, because I find no better example of hegemony, ...