Frantz Fanon in Italy.

This introduction to the special issue on ‘Frantz Fanon in Italy’ provides an overview of Fanon's influence on Italian intellectual and political life, with special focus on the significant impact his writings had on the renovation of the Italian Left in the 1960s, as well as highlighting the continuities between Italian anti-fascism and anticolonialism. 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, prior to his revival through the ‘symptomatic readings’ of Homi Bhabha, Stuart Hall and other theorists in the 1980s. I also discuss the editorial history of Fanon's publication in Italian; Italy was the first country after France in which Fanon's work appeared, and Giovanni Pirelli's 1971 edition of Fanon's writings,Opere scelte, is possibly the only anthology that presents a selection of essays culled from Fanon's different texts. The Italian Fanon, then, not only offers us an interpretation of the thinker that is specific to Italy, but also serves to historicize his impact in relation to the intellectual and political developments of his time. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]