Author’s Note: This response is adapted from my introduction to the Italian translation of Contesting Race and Citizenship (Razza e cittadinanza. Frontiere contese e contestate nel Mediterraneo nero, Astarte Edizioni, 2023).
T
hank you to LaToya Eaves, Ilaria Giglioli, Levi Van Sant, Omawu Diane Enobabor, and Akira Drake Rodriguez for their incredibly generative responses to my book; to Ryan Burns, who co-organized the AAG Author Meets Readers session on which this forum is based; and to Rae Rosenberg for his editorial labor.
Contesting Race and Citizenship is a time capsule. I conducted the research for this book between 2012 and 2019. When I first set out to understand a new generation of Black political activism in Italy, I was immersed in debates about the terms of collective identification. The language of Black or Afro-Italianness was new, tentative, and emergent—and many young organizers I interviewed were not yet fully convinced by the political utility of these descriptors. Just in that regard, much has changed in the intervening years. In 2019, for instance, a group of Black Italian women penned an open letter to the Corriere della Sera’s Style magazine in response to racist imagery depicting a young Black girl seated at the feat of Milan mayor Beppe Sala. The authors introduced themselves as “Donne Nere Italiane” (Black Italian Women) and each signed their names with “Donna Nera” (Black Woman) in place of an institutional affiliation. Even between the time when I finished writing Contesting Race and Citizenship and the English version being available for purchase in 2022, new activist figures, debates, mobilizations, and campaigns had already emerged—from the #CambieRAI campaign addressing the ubiquity of anti-Black language and imagery on Italy’s national public television broadcasting channels, to the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests in Milan and beyond. Indeed, I agonized over when and where to “end” my book, because each time I completed a draft of the book’s conclusion it seemed that there was something new to consider. Still, despite the temporal limitations of this text, I hope it continues to have usefulness as an archive—as an account of a conjunctional moment when a new generation of Black Italian activists emerged in the midst of a rising tide of xenophobic nationalism to challenge the anti-Black racism and coloniality at the heart of the Italian project itself. Again, a time capsule.
Yet in another sense—a deeply infuriating sense—this book is evergreen. The Italian government collapsed in the summer of 2022 after Prime Minister Mario Draghi resigned and President Sergio Mattarella dissolved the Italian parliament when the Movimento 5 Stelle, the Lega, and Forza Italia withdrew their support from the national unity government. The resulting 25 September 2022 snap elections culminated in the victory of a center-right coalition government led by neofascist Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, who is widely regarded as the most far-right Italian head of government since Benito Mussolini (who Meloni has publicly praised as a great leader). The government collapse also took with it the most recent attempt at a reform of Italian citizenship law. This proposal, known as ius scholae, would have provided a path to citizenship for children of immigrants who were born in Italy or arrived before the age of 12, have legal residence, and passed at least five years of school in Italy.
While this proposal would have been an important step toward expanding citizenship rights, ius scholae also resurfaced challenging questions about the possibilities and limits of citizenship similar to the ones I traced in Contesting Race and Citizenship. The Partito Democratico’s campaign posters for ius scholae included slogans such as “Chi studia in italia è italiano: ius scholae per i bambini che vanno a scuola con i nostri figli” (“Whoever studies in Italy is Italian: jus scholae for the children who go to school with our children”—a notable departure from earlier slogans such as “Chi nasce in italia è italiano” (“Whoever is born in Italy is Italian”). Why should citizenship be something earned through schooling, rather than a right based on residence or birthplace? Who is the “our” in “our children”? What notions of Italianness are being reproduced through this new formulation of citizenship? The question of who is counted within the “our” of the national family is especially pressing as Meloni, evoking her predecessor Mussolini, stokes fears of ethnic substitution and casts the LGBT+ community and immigrants as threats to Italianness (Ben-Ghiat, 2022).
And Black people in Italy continue to face deadly violence. Willy Monteiro, a twenty-one-year-old Cape Verdean–Italian, was beaten to death by a group of white men in Rome in 2020 while coming to the defense of a friend. Alika Ogorchukwu, a disabled Nigerian street vendor, was beaten to death by a white man in Civitanova Marche in 2022 in front of a crowd of bystanders who did not intervene on his behalf. And lest we succumb to the myth that police and carceral violence are merely North American problems, numerous cases of racial profiling and brutality at the hands of Italian police have circulated across traditional and social media—perhaps most visibly in the case of professional footballer Tiemoué Bakayoko. These stories do not even begin to exhaust the toll of physical and psychic violence unleashed on Black people in Italy just during the past several years. These stories are not aberrations. As Wissal Houbabi and Marie Moïse argued in the Italian magazine Internazionale, “The murder of Alika Ogorchukwu is not exceptional in a country where over forty racially-motivated murders were committed in the last forty years, not counting the survivors of supremacist attacks, beatings in prisons, in immigrant detention facilities, or in places like the police station of Piacenza” (Houbabi and Moïse, 2022).
And yet, this book was never meant to be an inventory of Black death. I am not an academic corner (Woods, 2002: 63). As Robin D. G. Kelley reminds us, reducing Black people to mere fungible and violated bodies only reproduces our dehumanization (see also McKittrick, 2021). It ignores the ways we have continued to create communities, forge new cultural forms, engage in radical resistance and struggle, and dream more free and just worlds—all in the face of enslavement, colonialism, racist aggression, and border violence (Kelley, 2016). We must acknowledge the ongoing apocalypse of Black oppression, honor those we have lost, and hold tight to the insight that Blackness has always exceeded suffering and violence. “Resistance is our heritage,” Kelley writes. “And resistance is our healing.”
I believe that we are in a time of incredible possibility. This may seem a naïve assessment, in a conjuncture characterized by a global resurgence of fascism and racist nationalism, the brutal fortification of borders, the intensification of economic inequality and precarization. This decade is often referred to as a crisis, or a Gramscian interregnum in which an existing social formation is crumbling but a new one has yet to take shape. Yet as abolitionist geographer Ruth Wilson Gilmore (2007: 54) argues, drawing on Stuart Hall, “Crisis is not objectively bad or good; rather, it signals systemic change whose outcome is determined through struggle.” In other words, the outcome of this moment of crisis is neither fixed nor predetermined; we have the opportunity to prefigure a better world out of the ashes of the old, through collective struggle. And in that sense, what is happening in Italy has far-reaching implications. Black Italian struggles for racial justice are crucial for understanding how to resist the forces of racial-capitalist-nationalism that are shaping our world today, underscoring the necessity of forging interconnections among diverse struggles for justice. I saw this last summer during my book tour in Italy, when Black activists in Naples were eager to use Antonio Gramsci and W. E. B. Du Bois’ engagements with “southern questions” as theoretical tools for crafting Mediterranean political solidarities capable of stretching across lines such as class, citizenship, and immigration status. And I see this now, in the powerful ways Black Italians have mobilized in solidarity with Palestinians during the genocidal Israeli assault on Gaza. These radical Mediterraneanisms “from below” are also urgently necessary for challenging the reproduction of racist border violence along the Mediterranean’s southern shores, where North African states have been recruited into European Union projects of border externalization and migration management and the president of Tunisia stokes fears of a Black “great replacement.”
This returns me to the question, central to Contesting Race and Citizenship, of how Black Italy fits within the global Black diaspora. Blackness as a concept (and practice) is anti-national, capacious and diasporic—and as such, Black politics are inherently outer-national in scope. Yet too often, discussions of global Black politics take as their starting point North America (specifically, the United States) and then expand outwards to trace the reverberations of Black American culture and politics across the diaspora. But as the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests in Italy revealed, this narrative does not capture the complexity of diasporic dialogues and interconnections. Black Italians are not merely responding to the incitements of their sisters and brothers across the Atlantic—they are articulating new subjectivities and practices of resistance that draw on different relationships to historical keystones such as enslavement, colonialism, and trans-oceanic movement. When we begin to productively provincialize North American Blackness, we can also reap valuable lessons from the struggles unfolding in the Black Mediterranean. As I have written elsewhere, “Black Italians are racialized subjects, former colonial subjects, and have direct connections to migration and border regimes; their multifaceted cultural politics and activism also intervene directly into feminist questions of nation, kinship, and citizenship” (Hawthorne, 2023: 501). There is an urgency in this moment to articulate connections between the Black Atlantic and the Black Mediterranean, on a theoretical and historical level, as well as at the level of concrete, practical transnational activism and movement-building.
The struggle continues!
References
Ben-Ghiat, R (2022) The Return of Fascism in Italy. The Atlantic, 23 September. Available here (accessed 11 January 2024).
Gilmore, RW (2007) Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Hawthorne, C (2023) Black Mediterranean Geographies: Translation and the Mattering of Black Life in Italy. Gender, Place & Culture 30(3): 484–507.
Houbabi W and Moïse M (2022). Un immenso pubblico bianco ha permesso l’assassinio di Alika Ogorchukwu. Internazionale, 31 July. Available here (accessed 11 January 2024).
Kelley, Robin DG (2016) Black Study, Black Struggle. Boston Review, 1 March. Available here (accessed 11 January 2024).
McKittrick K (2021) Dear Science and Other Stories. Durham: Duke University Press.
Woods C (2002). Life after Death. The Professional Geographer 54(1): 62–66.
Camilla Hawthorne is Associate Professor of Sociology and Critical Race & Ethnic Studies at UC Santa Cruz. She is author of Contesting Race and Citizenship: Youth Politics in the Black Mediterranean (Cornell University Press, 2022; translated into Italian as Razza e cittadinanza. Frontiere contese e contestate nel Mediterraneo nero, Astarte Edizioni, 2023) and co-editor of The Black Mediterranean: Bodies, Borders and Citizenship (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021) and The Black Geographic: Praxis, Resistance, Futurity (Duke University Press, 2023). You can find Camilla on Twitter @camillahawth.
