Black Mediterranean geographies: translation and the mattering of Black Life in Italy

Abstract

In this paper, I weave together insights from Black and postcolonial feminist theory and Black geographies to think through the theoretical and political provocations offered by the concept of the Black Mediterranean. First, I discuss the notion of the Black Mediterranean, and how it both draws upon and extends Paul Gilroy’s Black Atlantic. Then, I turn to consider how the Black Mediterranean complicates universalizing narratives that read Blackness solely through the geographies of racial slavery and the plantation. From there, I reflect on the fraught but necessary work of translating Blackness across distinct yet interconnected global geographies and histories of racial formation. Finally, I conclude with lessons the Black Mediterranean offers for abolitionist, antiracist, anticolonial, and no-border struggles unfolding across the world in this political moment. The experiences of Black Italians (who are racialized subjects, former colonial subjects, and have direct connections to migration and border regimes) demonstrate the importance of developing more capacious political formations that are not oriented on descent-based, identitarian claims but rather on shared political visions, intertwined histories of struggle and resistance, and nonlinear diasporic entanglements that disrupt state systems of categorization.

Keywords:

• Black geographies
• Italy
• Citizenship
• Racism
• Black Mediterranean
• Migration

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to the Jan Monk Lecture Committee at the University of Arizona for inviting me to deliver the 2021 Jan Monk Lecture—especially Chris Lukinbeal and Lise Nelson for coordinating my virtual visit, as well as Philana Adora Jeremiah for organizing a lunch chat with graduate students in the Department of Geography at the University of Arizona. Many thanks also to Lena Grip for organizing my presentation of the Jan Monk Lecture at the 2020 American Association of Geographers Annual Meeting, and for giving me the opportunity to publish a revised version of my lecture as an article in Gender, Place, and Culture. I would like to thank Donald Moore for his generative comments on an early draft of this article. Conversations with Jovan Scott Lewis also deeply informed my thinking. Finally, I would like to express my appreciation for the faculty and graduate students in the Black Geographies Lab at UC Santa Cruz, with whom I have explored and workshopped many of the ideas that appear in this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 I work with an expansive and relational understanding of the Mediterranean that includes not only the countries that immediately border the Mediterranean Sea, but also the people and regions with historical, cultural, economic, and migratory connections to the Mediterranean (to give one example: postcolonial theorist Iain Chambers notes the centrality of sub-Saharan African gold in the Mediterranean trade networks of the fourteenth century [2008, 137]).

2 For other geographical perspectives on gender, citizenship, and cross-border mobilities in the Mediterranean, see Tamboukou 2021; Vaiou 2012.

3 It is also worth noting that even in the U.S. context, there is ongoing scholarly dialogue about the extent to which ‘the slave past provides a ready prism for apprehending the black political present,’ which, for Stephen Best, turns on the broader historiographical and ethical question of why we must ‘predicate having an ethical relation to the past on an assumed continuity between that past and our present and on the implicit consequence that to study the past is to somehow intervene in it’ (2012, 154).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Camilla Hawthorne

Camilla Hawthorne is Assistant Professor of Sociology and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her work focuses on Black geographies and the racial politics of migration and citizenship. She is a co-editor of The Black Mediterranean: Bodies, Borders, and Citizenship (Palgrave Macmillan 2021) and the author of Contesting Race and Citizenship: Youth Politics in the Black Mediterranean (Cornell University Press 2022).