Translating Revolution: The Impact of Frantz Fanon and the Renovation of European Radical Thought

Neelam Srivastava (Newcastle University)

It is largely through translation that Frantz Fanon’s work has become known throughout the world. Understanding the impact of Fanon in different countries and languages shows how successfully his theories travel, and how they readily have been applied to diverse contexts of struggle and oppression, thus realizing the potential of Fanon’s universalizing tendencies in his anti-colonial writings, even when he was writing specifically about the Algerian struggle for independence against French colonial occupation. In this paper, I examine the ways in which Frantz Fanon was a significant if unexplored presence in European cultural and political life, with a particular focus on Italy. As a “Third-Worldist” author, Fanon had an impact on the renovation of the Italian Left in the 1960s and 1970s, and in particular his work highlighted to an Italian audience the continuities between anti-fascism and anti-colonialism. Italian was probably the first language into which Fanon’s work was translated. Fanon ’ s Italian reception is interesting for postcolonial scholars in that it differs from the Anglo-American tradition of Fanonian scholarship, and reveals a “ pre-postcolonial ” Fanon, an activist who changed the way forward-looking European intellectuals conceived of renovation and change in their own societies, especially in terms of politics and psychiatry.