Citizenship, Race and the Mediterranean: The Case of Italy
PINA PICCOLO
Abstract
Camilla Hawthorne’s Contesting Race and Citizenship: Youth Politics in the Black Mediterranean (Ithaca N.Y. Cornell University Press, 2022, 324 pages) draws on archival research as well as the most recent scholarship in Black Diasporic studies centred on Europe, the Black Mediterranean, classical postcolonial works on the transatlantic slave trade measured against new historiography focusing on the Mediterranean’s role as the first site of the plantation economy, as well as interviews with young black activists, artists and community leaders.
Its core contribution is demonstrating the inextricable connection between nation building in Italy and the definition of citizenship as exclusively tied to whiteness. The twists and turns of this basic premise are tracked over the 160 years of Italian history, including pre- and post-Fascist years, the nations’ colonial ventures, the post-war period all the way to today and the rise of Black youth as an autonomous political subject raising citizenship as their sine qua non demand.
The final chapters speculate on the need to shift the focus of their outlook and organizing to the South, devising new ways of interacting with current migrations across the Mediterranean, thus seizing the opportunity to forge solidarity links with today’s international diasporic networks as well as engaging with potential allies implied in the colonial status past and present of the Mezzogiorno as a whole. This shift to the South, from the current barycentre in the North where a sizeable majority of Black youth reside, is fleshed out through interviews with Black Italian youth activists and community leaders and supported by the most recent scholarship on Caribbean multi-layered realities (the framing of which Camilla Hawthorne finds akin to the racial, economic and political situation in Italy) including Yarimar Bonilla’s notion of ‘strategic entanglement’.
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Race, citizenship, Italy, youth, migration, colonialism, activism
Pages
97-101