Racin and the Significance of a National Culture

Abstract

In the text RACIN and the Significance of a National Culture I’ll speak further on Racin’s publications, namely, his political reflections, which apart from their notable social dimension also possess an explicitly national and moral dimension. Along those lines, I’ll see to a contextualization of the same, in the span of seventy years, as the world order had undergone momentous changes, not only in terms of political and ideological shifts, but rather through a change in the class-based and race-bound paradigms. This, in turn, allows me to draw a parallel between our Kosta Racin, a progressive people’s thinker, a revolutionary and a socialist, a poet and a journalist stemming from the realm of the old Yugoslavia, on the one hand, and the Franco-based existential humanist, the psychiatrist Frantz Fanon, the progenitor of the anticolonial movement in the countries of the Third World, on the other. Even though the parallel between Racin and Fanon may seem a bit far-fetched, the fact remains that both were involved with socially-centered, nationally-bound and revolutionary-focused questions, thus emphasizing, first and foremost, the significance of a national culture amidst the conditions of political, economic and spiritual enslavement. As proponents of socialist ideas and Marxist ideology, as revolutionaries and fighters for national and human rights who had experienced the turmoil of war, both men exhibited a higher consciousness when it came to matters related to the state of the national culture with the enslaved colonized peoples, with one difference in mind, namely, that in the case of Racin, the emphasis was placed on the class-related national aspect, whereas with Fanon, the emphasis was placed on the race-related national aspect.