The Left Out of History

Abstract

Giorgio Cesarale's book A Sinistra takes for granted the fertility of the encounter between the ‘bourgeois revolution’ and anti-systemic movements from below. But it is an open question whether a radical ‘stretching’ of the notion of the ‘Left’ to encompass, if not to synthesise, sub-altern studies, black radical tradition and anti-colonial indigenous political philosophies, as well as anti-capitalist feminisms, requires rewriting or abandoning the framework of political modernity, especially as crystallised in the short twentieth century.