I
n Citizenship, political theorist Etienne Balibar argues that there is an antinomic relationship between citizenship and democracy (Balibar, 2016). Emphatically, he suggests that if we analyze articulations of power in this dynamic dialectically, we can also observe what he notes as the “transformation of the political.” Balibar’s emphasis on citizenship as historically transformative, and potentially destructive or constructive, obfuscates and slightly neglects the enormity of marginal migrant subjectivities conditioned by the category of “citizenship.” Camilla Hawthorne’s Contesting Race and Citizenship: Youth Politics in the Black Mediterranean enhances Balibar’s assertion that citizenship as a political space to analyze power is worthwhile, and attempts to reconcile his oversights by redirecting our attention from the political claims constitutive of forming and reforming “citizenship” and its democratic potential, to those whose political subjectivities and day-to-day lives are recognized as alienated from it (Balibar, 2016; Hawthorne, 2022). We are challenged to grapple with this antinomic and pernicious relationship as foundational to the liberal nation-state. By following Hawthorne’s (2022) observations of the everyday negotiations of citizenship as intrinsic to Black Italian identities, we can see her central thesis in this text not only as a critical intervention for citizenship studies, but also as a new strategy within activist-scholar research. The author persuades the reader to interrogate the concept of citizenship not simply as the highest goal of liberal politics, but also as a terrain of struggle that can be the platform for articulating other sorts of political solidarities.
The text is divided into two main sections: Citizenship and Diasporic Politics. In Section 1, Chapter 1, Hawthorne describes how the “pathway” to Italian citizenship as a political aspiration challenges the limits of liberal citizenship. Hawthorne (2022) asserts that by recognizing the contradictions and lived experiences of lives shaped by liminal legal status in Italy, we are privy to processes of race and racialization meant to sustain a hegemonic relationality dependent on proximity to citizenship. This example is best realized in Chapter 2, “Black Entrepreneurs and the ‘(Re)Making’ of Italy.” In this chapter, Hawthorne examines how race, gender, and class have worked as articulated categories that continually reproduce one another and give each other meaning in relationship to Italian citizenship. By observing Black women entrepreneurs in Italy, particularly those in the fashion and hair care industries, Black women narratives as the node of critical inquiry can go from being within the white supremacist gaze of representing the condensation of Italy’s triple crisis into situating how we think about a cosmopolitan Italianness, which defines who and what is made in Italy, who is making Italy today, and who will make Italy in the future—expanding how we think about who will (re)produce the nation (Hawthorne, 2022)
The Black Mediterranean as a political claim to Black citizenship in Italy grounds Chapter 3’s historical analysis around the “Southern Question,” which concerns Italy as a racial geography. Italy’s liminal racial geography between Europe and Africa helps us understand how—despite the fact that “Africa, Blackness and Black diasporic routes are actually constitutive of Italianness” and a supposedly liberal “multiracial and multicultural conviviality” exists in the Mediterranean (Hawthorne, 2022: 97)—historical, anti-Black, anti-African racisms reproduce systems of racial categorization. For Section 2, Diasporic Politics, the task of translating Black Italy practically operationalizes contemporary Black Italian activism as a site for knowledge acquisition around ongoing transnational Black Italian diasporas as political formations. In Chapter 4, where we are shown that Black Italian identity as part of the wider African diaspora can be addressed as a relation or process rather than a static state of exile or displacement—contoured by dominant and global transnational articulations of Blackness, and yet also constricted and pushed against by “imaginaries and discourses of Mediterranean difference [that] shaped Italian racial theorization in ways that distinguish it from northern Europe” (Hawthorne, 2022: 147). We can see the contradictions that further stretch political Blackness into a critical space of solidarity where the polemic of “this could have been any one of us” (Hawthorne, 2022: 133) disembarks liberal ambiguity and shifts into a call to action. Hawthorne shows this to us time and time again. For instance, my favorite vignette in the book is about the mutual aid work done in Porta Venezia, in Chapter 5. Here, we can see struggles that are oriented on “shared trans-Mediterranean histories of racial dispossession rather than on naturalized notions of citizenship, birthplace, descent, culture, or territory” (Hawthorne, 2022: 182).
This book is a manual on writing a text based on Black geographical thought for graduate students working within the tradition of Black Geographies. From the methodological appendix, to the close attention to how analytical frameworks can be extended to critically observe hegemonic relations within a matrix of sites at different scales, Hawthorne's embodied approach is a resource on Black geographic methods. For instance, Hawthorne’s attention to the specificities of Cedric Robinson’s theoretical analysis of racial capitalism operates in the work as a critical and fundamental point of departure for understanding race, citizenship, and Blackness at various scales. The author explicates Robinsons’ insights on racial capitalism to observe the Black diaspora in the Mediterrean and racial citizenship between northern and southern Italy. Her approach evokes a dialectic to understand space and placemaking in Italy—a launching point to work and rework conceptual frameworks and places as part of the process of doing Black Geographies. Hawthorne's strategy reminds me of Katherine McKittrick and Clyde Woods’ (2007: 4) call to recognize that “spaces of les damnés as invisible/forgettable at the same time as the invisible/forgettable is producing space—always, and in many ways.” I sit with Hawthorne’s concern about Blackness being associated to death in the book’s conclusion—for instance, through the spectacle of African lives lost to the Mediterranean Sea due to militarized border externalization practices (McKittrick and Woods, 2007). I appreciate her text as a means to recognize that Black space is ongoing in formation, moving and actively resisting death as a space.
By operationalizing global queer Black political movements within the context of Italy, we might find transformative possibilities for envisioning and articulating new perspectives on Black experiences and identities in the region. LaToya Eaves (2017) asserts in her article “Black Geographic Possibilities” that queer Black geographies as crucial sites of knowledge production require attention to both embodied experiences and material realities. What can we learn about Black Italian women as entrepreneurs that disrupts monolithic narratives, understandings of agency, and Blackness in this region if we take seriously their embodied experiences of prejudices and racisms experienced via colorism, xenophobia, and homophobia? I can also call in SA Smythe’s (2021: 162) trans study, which calls for a Black non-binary method that “shifts into a neither/nor divestment from any of the currently presented options in favor of something else yet to be presented or embodied.” Hawthorne's text is formidable in Black studies within many dimensions.
Overall, this scholarly work challenges readers to transcend the confines of categorization prevalent in the domains of citizenship and migration studies. It advocates adopting a nuanced understanding of the political frameworks in these fields, allowing for insightful observations derived from activists’ experiences to serve as valuable sources for knowledge production. Hawthorne practices this by using embodied ethnography as a launching point for interpolating racialization and its global relativity between herself and her interlocutors. This book should be at the front of canonical texts on race and racialization in Europe, migration, and citizenship studies, and Black Geographies.
References
Balibar E (2016) Citizenship. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Eaves LE (2017) Black Geographic Possibilities: On a queer black South. Southeastern Geographer 57(1): 80–95.
Hawthorne C (2022) Contesting Race and Citizenship: Youth Politics in the Black Mediterranean. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
McKittrick K and Woods CA (2007) Black Geographies and the Politics of Place. Boston: South End Press.
Smythe SA (2021) Black Life, trans study. TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, 8(2): 158–171.
Omawu Diane Enobabor is a PhD candidate in Earth and Environmental Sciences at CUNY Graduate Center. Her work analyzes Black Migrant Mobilities in the Americas.
