Contesting Race and Citizenship

Front matter

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Part 2 Acknowledgments Note on Language, Terminology, and Translation

Introduction: Contested Borders in the Time of Monsters

CITIZENSHIP 1. Italian Ethnonationalism and the Limits of Citizenship 2. Black Entrepreneurs and the “(Re)Making” of Italy

DIASPORIC POLITICS 4. Translation and the Lived Geographies of the Black

Mediterranean

Conclusion: Looking South Coda

Methodological Appendix Notes

Index xvii

184 197

203 211 297 293

Acknowledgments

It should go without saying that a book is always a collective effort, rather than a singularly individual one. At the time of writing, this project has been with me for over a quarter of my life; as a result, it has been profoundly shaped by innumerable people, communities, and institutions. My editor at Cornell University Press, Jim Lance, and my developmental editor, Steve Hiatt, have shepherded this book through its many stages with immense care and attention, and cartographer Mike Bechthold created two beautiful illustrations for the manuscript. At UC Berkeley, I am deeply indebted to my dissertation committee— Jake Kosek, Michael Watts, Donald Moore, and Stephen Small—for their unwavering support and guidance over the years. I am also grateful for the way that our mentoring relationships have evolved into deep and meaningful friendships. It is not an exaggeration to say that I would not have finished my PhD if it were not for my powerhouse of a graduate cohort in the geography department, and especially the sisterhood that we still to this day lovingly refer to as the “Geogrababes”—Andrea Marson, Meredith Palmer, Erin Torkelson, and Mollie Van Gordon. Beyond my cohort, Ilaria Giglioli was and continues to be a trusted interlocutor on questions of racial boundary drawing in the Mediterranean. In addition, my many stimulating discussions with Angelo Matteo Caglioti about racial science in Liberal and Fascist Italy through the Center for Science, Technology, Medicine, and Society at UC Berkeley Italy influenced this book in profound ways.

I feel incredibly lucky to have found several amazing “homes” at my current institution of UC Santa Cruz. My colleagues in the sociology department— Hillary Angelo, Julie Bettie, Lindsey Dillon, James Doucet-Battle, Hiroshi Fukurai, Debbie Gould, Miriam Greenberg, Naya Jones, Juhee Kang, Rebecca London, Christie McCullen, Steve McKay, Megan McNamara, Jaimie Morse, Jenny Reardon, and Veronica Terriquez—have given me hope about the future of academia. Together, they have worked to model a rare kind of departmental culture founded on respect for rigorous, interdisciplinary research; support for the career success of all colleagues; care for each other’s well-being; and a dedication to research oriented toward social justice. I am also grateful to the community that is the Critical Race and Ethnic Studies Program at UCSC. Neda Atanasoski, Christine Hong, Jennifer Kelly, and Nick Mitchell in particular have provided immeasurable intellectual, political, and emotional comradeship over xi xii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS the years as I navigate junior faculty life. Finally, the Theorizing Race after Race research group at the Science and Justice Research Center has been a fruitful site of transdisciplinary engagement with questions of scientific knowledge production and the reproduction of racisms in the twenty-first century.

All along the way, my community at UC Santa Cruz has continued to grow and expand, even in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic during which I am currently writing. Whether through (prepandemic) dumpling parties with Amy Mihyang Ginther, A. M. Darke, Muriam Davis, and Nidhi Mahajan, epic Dungeons & Dragons campaigns with micha cardenas, Michael Chemers, Marcia Ochoa, and Elizabeth Swensen, or socially distanced Seabright walks with Lily Balloffet, I have found myself consistently surrounded by brilliant, caring, and politically fierce friends.

This book has been touched by more friends, comrades, and interlocutors in Italy than I could possibly list here—including Stephanie Adams, Angela Haisha Adamou, Evelyne Afaawua, Aida Bodian, Marilena Delli, Kwanza Musi Dos Santos, Gail Milissa Grant, Tommy Kuti, Fred Kuwornu, Ruth Maccarthy, Theophilus Marboah, Ark Joseph Ndulue, Medhin Paolos, Tamara Pizzoli, Adama Sanneh, Kibra Sebhat, Rahel Sereke, Ariam Tekle, Selam Tesfai, and Veronica Costanza Ward. I am also grateful for the community of academics and researchers I met over the course of my research in Italy who are dedicated to anti-racism and anticolonialism, including Sandra Kyremeh, Barbara Ofosu-Somuah, Igiaba Scego, Mackda Ghebremariam Tesfau’, Candice Whitney, Annalisa Frisina, Gaia Giuliani, Valentina Migliarini, and Pina Piccolo. I am especially proud to be a member of the Black Mediterranean Research Collective, alongside Ida Danewid, Vivian Gerrand, Giulia Grechi, Giuseppe Grimaldi, Christina Lombardi-Diop, Angelica Pesarini, Gabriele Proglio, Timothy Raeymakers, and P. Khalil Saucier. I have also benefited from the mentorship, support, and guidance of many other scholars of Italy and Black Europe, including Jacqueline Nassy Brown, John Gennari, Cristiana Giordano, Stephanie Malia Hom, Heather Merrill, Ann Morning, Olivette Otele, Lorgia Garcia Peña, Laura Ruberto, and Angeline Young. And I could not have carried out the archival portion of my research without Cristina Cilli, head archivist at the Archivio Lombroso at the University of Turin’s Museo di Antropologia Criminale “Cesare Lombroso”; Giacomo Giacobini, scientific director of the Archivio Carlo Giacomini at the Museo di Anatomia Umana “Luigi Ronaldo”, Gianluigi Mangiapane, researcher at the Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography at the University of Turin; and Giorgio Manzi and Giovanni Destro Bisol of the Istituto Italiano di Antropologia.

Two other scholarly communities have left an indelible imprint on this work. Over the eight years of my involvement in the program, the Black Europe Summer School has become something of a family to me. Kwame Nimako, Mano Delea,

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS xiii

Philomena Essed, Jennifer Tosch, and Melissa Weiner in particular have supported and nurtured my growth as a scholar of Black Europe. And the growing field of Black geographies has become my intellectual home—a source of theoretical insight, mutual support, and political inspiration. The Berkeley Black Geographies Project (Jovan Scott Lewis and Brandi Summers); the UC Santa Cruz Black Geographies Lab (Naya Jones, Savannah Shange, Breanna Bryd, Elsa Calderon, Xafsa Ciise, shah noor hussein, Theresa Hice Johnson, Christopher Lang, Ki’Amber Thompson, Andrea del Carmen Vasquez, and Axelle Tousaint); and the Black Geographies Specialty Group of the American Association of Geographers (especially the group’s founder LaToya Eaves) have all profoundly shaped my thinking about the entanglements of racism, spatiality, and liberation.

Words cannot express the love and gratitude I hold for my parents Gigliola and Edward, who have been a rock of support throughout this entire project. They have read every word of this book (or listened to me read it) multiple times; they have been a sounding board for my ideas; and they have buoyed me with encouragement when I was feeling most discouraged and insecure. My partner Ali Esmaili was a source of infinite love, care, and empathy (not to mention, some deliciously decadent Saturday morning breakfasts) throughout the final stages of this book project, and for that I appreciate him immensely. I am also fortunate to have amazingly compassionate friends—including Melissa Henry, Ash Inglenook, Sarah Jimenez, Janina Larenas, Costanza Rampini, and Barbara Snyder—who have been willing to drop everything and swoop in with food, a stiff drink, a long phone call, new music, silly animal GIFs, or a walk when I need them most. And those who know me well would be shocked if I did not mention Claude Debris, my beloved dumpster gremlin. I never could have imagined that a fuzzy little stray kitten found in a compost bin at a marina would become my most fiercely loyal (though stubbornly bitey) comrade.

I also want to thank all of those who have helped me tend to my mental and physical well-being. My therapist Lara Lenington has worked with me to cultivate a practice of mindfulness and self-acceptance that enabled me to see this book project through. The mind is not separate from the body, and so Iam also grateful to my trainer Jason Lenington and my aerial hoop instructor Kelsey Keitges. Not only have they gotten me out from behind the computer screen, they have helped me become more confident and learn to embrace my strength.

I would like to extend an additional thanks to the many institutions that have invited me to present pieces of this book when it was still a work in progress, including the Canadian Association for Italian Studies, the University of Arizona, UC Santa Barbara, UC San Diego, UC Irvine, the Ohio State University, UNC Greensboro, the Freie Universitat Berlin, UC Berkeley, Stanford University, UC Merced, the University of Michigan, the University of Minnesota, New xiv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

College of Florida, Ohlone College, and the Center for Cultural Studies at UC Santa Cruz.

The research undergirding this book was supported by a UC Berkeley Cota-Robles Graduate Fellowship, a Ford Foundation Predoctoral Fellowship, UC Berkeley geography department travel grants, UC Berkeley Graduate Division travel grants, an Associated Students of the University of California Academic Opportunity Fund Grant, a UC Berkeley Center for Science, Technology, Medicine, and Society fieldwork grant, and a UC Santa Cruz Committee on Research New Faculty Research Grant. I also received funding from the UC Santa Cruz Institute for Social Transformation to hold a book manuscript accelerator workshop with scholars including Chris Benner, David Theo Goldberg, Fatima El-Tayeb, and Claudio Fogu. Their careful, incredibly generous feedback helped to make this book into the best version of itself.

Some notes on the text you are about to read: I have used pseudonyms for most names; these instances are marked in endnotes. I used real names (with permission) when writing about individuals who were speaking or acting in their capacity as prominent figures in the public eye. In addition, some of the material in this book has been previously published elsewhere. The introduction and chapter 4 draw from my article “In Search of Black Italia: Notes on Race, Belonging, and Activism in the Black Mediterranean,” which was published in Transition 123 in 2017. Chapter 2 draws from my article “Making Italy: Afro- Italian Entrepreneurs and the Racial Boundaries of Citizenship,” published in Social and Cultural Geography in 2019.

In 2019, the award-winning Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie was awarded the Premio Speciale Afriche (Special Africa Prize) at the BookCity Milano festival. During a question-and-answer session, she turned to the subject of Black Italian representation:

The story of not just Afro-Italians, but of Afro-Europeans, is invisible. We don't hear those stories. They exist, right? And by Afro-Europeans I mean people of African descent who were born in European countries, whose lives have been here, who speak the languages. The same people who, I am told, today in this country are not allowed to be citizens until they are 18. I find that ridiculous. . . . Those stories, even I don’t know them; I want to hear them, because I think they haven’t been heard; they’re invisible. We need to hear them.!

Her comments were met with raucous applause, including shouts of “Thank you!” from Black Italians in the audience. But the next day, the Italian-Somali

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS XV writer Igiaba Scego responded to Adichie’s remarks by pushing back against the notion that Black Italian stories are hidden:

The story of Afro-Italians is not silent, and this is important to reiterate. . . . There is a history of literature, a plural story, that has not been silent; a story made by immigrants and the children of immigrants, who have fought against the color line that was imposed upon them by an Italian system that is deaf to plurality. What we have to tell Chimamanda and everyone else is that there is an Afro-Italian story and, more broadly, that there is a plural story here of people with immigrant backgrounds. A story that has been forged in trade union struggles against labor exploitation, in the struggles in the piazze for citizenship, in the taking of stands against racist murders (Fermo, Florence, Macerata), in the struggle against colonial amnesia, in the demands by asylum-seekers against an Italian state that does not even remember colonizing those countries. . . . It is our duty to tell our stories, and above all to build bridges with their struggles, because even if it comes in different shades, ultimately we all experience the same discrimination.”

I hope that the stories, accounts, and analyses I share in this book can contribute to the ever-growing chorus of voices helping to narrate the past, present, and future of Black Italy and the struggle for substantive racial justice across Italy, Black Europe, and the Black Mediterranean.

Note on Language, Terminology, and Translation

What are the terms by which one’s political claims can become recognizable?’ Or, to echo Tina Campt’s provocation in Other Germans, what labels should be used to describe a “group of people for whom there existed no positive term of reference as individuals of both Black and [Italian] heritage”? For Black Italians, language is a key terrain on which debates about identity and belonging are currently staged.° Unlike in the United States, where there is at least some general consensus around the use of terms such as “African American” and “Black,” in Italy the language of self-identification is vast, varied, and highly contested—a testament to the relative newness of these conversations. Some of the terms used by my interlocutors included “second generation,” “new generation,” “new Italian,” “Italian-plus,” “Black Italian,” “Afro-Italian,” and hyphenated terms that identify specific countries of family origin (such as “Italian-Ghanaian” and “Italian-Eritrean”). Each term marks a different set of commitments and has certain political implications.

For the purpose of consistency, I use “Black Italian” throughout Contesting Race and Citizenship to refer to the children of Black African or Afro-Latinx immigrants who were born and/or raised in Italy, as well as the “mixed-race” children of unions between Black Africans / Afro-Latinxs and white Italians, or between Black Americans and white Italians. While my interlocutors span these categories, I found that they most frequently used the terms “Afro-Italian” or “Black Italian” to refer to themselves individually and collectively (though not necessarily to the exclusion of other labels). Appellations such as “Afro-Italian” or “Black Italian” are intended both by myself and by my interlocutors to designate similarities not in terms of biological descent, but in terms of lived experience—they work to establish a form of kinship based on shared (but not identical) struggles. On the occasions when I use the term “Afrodescendant,” this is a deliberate choice to emphasize the political activation of a sense of shared connection to the African continent among Black people who were born and raised in Italy and Black migrants from the African continent. In the chapters that follow, and particularly in chapter 4, I will address the ways that contestations over the language of collective identification are also tied to a larger set of political negotiations about Black solidarity, alliance, and diaspora—negotiations that are always imbricated with ideas related to race, nation, gender, color, class, and kinship. It should also be noted that any references to Black Italians in this xvii xviii NOTE ON LANGUAGE, TERMINOLOGY, AND TRANSLATION book are not intended to generalize across the experiences of all Black Italians— and indeed, part of my intellectual and political project in these pages is to challenge the notion of a unified, collective Black subject in Italy or elsewhere.

In this book, I also write about Black or sub-Saharan African immigrants, refugees, and asylum seekers. In those instances, I use “migrant” or “immigrant” to refer generally to people who have crossed a geopolitical border to arrive in Italy, and “refugee” or “asylum seeker” in specific reference to those who are migrating in search of humanitarian protection.” Nonetheless, while I recognize the juridical power of these categories to profoundly shape the experiences of migration, I am not interested in drawing ethical or moral distinctions between “economic migrants” and “humanitarian refugees.”* Finally, in cases when I refer to sub-Saharan African (as opposed to Black) migrants or refugees, this is a deliberate decision to denote the places from which these groups arrived in Europe—not to suggest that the category of Black is inapplicable to them. The reason I employ these sorts of geographic descriptors is to signal the very distinct political and social responses in Italy to the presence of immigrants and refugees arriving from sub-Saharan Africa, as opposed to places such as Syria. Finally, I also use “African migrants/refugees” as shorthand for sub-Saharan African migrants/refugees—this is for the sake of textual brevity, not to collapse the experiences of North and Sub-Saharan Africans.

Of course, questions of terminology are not only relevant to Black folk in Italy. As Alessandro Portelli notes, Italians do not typically perceive themselves as “white,” but rather as simply “normal”? Building on Portelli’s observation, Angelica Pesarini argues: “Such a structural colour-blindness . . . is problematic because it associates Whiteness with normality and, consequently, with Italianness. Simply put, to be Italian is to be White. Within this discourse, those who do not fit the alleged (White) Italian type are deemed outside the Nation on a number of levels.”” For this reason, throughout Contesting Race and Citizenship I have made a point to mark what is typically left unmarked by specifying white Italian (as opposed to simply Italian) where appropriate. This choice is intended to challenge the taken-for-granted conflation of Italianness and the Italian national body with both whiteness and normality in the popular racial imaginary.

CONTESTING RACE AND CITIZENSHIP