‘Fanon in the 'Second World': Yugoslavia, Poland, and the USSR’

This chapter helps to map Frantz Fanon's worldwide impact and the role of translation in generating it, by examining Fanon's presence in the 'Second World' and discusses Yugoslavia, Poland and the Soviet Union, and translations into Croato-Serbian, Serbo-Croatian, Polish and Russian, as the case studies. It contributes the recent analyses of the Cold War period which criticise a reductive view of the Third World actors as 'mere pawns in a larger conflict' and attempts to map interactions between the so-called Second and Third Worlds, seeking traces of alliances or 'alternative solidarities'. At the time Fanon's work reached Yugoslav audiences in the 1960s and 1970s, the social and political circumstances were somewhat specific and very different from those in other countries of the 'Second World'. The chapter explores the Polish reception of Frantz Fanon, examining two book translations completed to date: the 1962 translation of L'An V de la revolution algérienne and the translation of Les Damnés de la terre.