Black Spaces
African Diaspora in Italy
1st Edition
Published on 1. June 2018
Book
Hardback
234 pages
978-1-138-04325-1 (ISBN)
Description
Black Spaces examines how space and place are racialized, and the impacts on everyday experiences among African Italians, immigrants, and refugees. It explores the deeply intertwined histories of Africa and Europe, and how people of African descent negotiate, contest, and live with anti-blackness in Italy. The vast majority of people crossing the Mediterranean into Europe are from West Africa and the Horn of Africa. Their passage is part of the legacy of Italian and broader European engagement in colonial projects. This largely forgotten history corresponds with an ongoing effort to erase them from the Italian social landscape on arrival. Black Spaces examines these racialized spaces by blending a critical geographical approach to place and space with Afro-Pessimist and critical race perspectives on the lived experiences of Blackness and anti-blackness in Italy.
Reviews / Votes
Heather Merrill has done it again. While her previous book broke new ground by studying the challenges of multi-racial feminist activism in Italy, this new contribution enlarges the picture. Here she takes aim at Italian common sense concerning race, while passionately foregrounding the lives of African migrants and Afro-Italians who daily navigate the deadly politics of exclusion. For all those who read with horror the headlines emanating from an increasingly anti-immigrant and antiBlack Europe, this book is for you. And for those who hold out hope that spaces of oppression may generate life-affirming possibilities, this book is also for you.Jacqueline Nassy Brown, Author of Dropping Anchor, Setting Sail: Geographies of Race in Black Liverpool
A vital investigation of African migrant experiences in contemporary Italy, Black Spaces blends ethnographic methods and Black Pessimist theories to explore the material and symbolic meanings of social life and social death. This nuanced account of national and racial formations highlights mundane, and sometimes extraordinary, actions and utterances that bear witness to individual and collective examples of resistance to the erasure of African subjects from European civic life. Black Spaces is a formidable account of the workings of race and nation, power and relation in the modern era.
Daphne Lamothe, Associate Professor of Africana Studies, Smith College
More details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
London
United Kingdom
Publishing group
Taylor & Francis Ltd
Target group
College/higher education
Illustrations
26 s/w Abbildungen, 24 s/w Photographien bzw. Rasterbilder, 2 s/w Zeichnungen
2 Line drawings, black and white; 24 Halftones, black and white; 26 Illustrations, black and white
Dimensions
Height: 235 mm
Width: 157 mm
Thickness: 17 mm
Weight
496 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-138-04325-1 (9781138043251)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
Book
06/2018
1st Edition
Routledge
€63.00
Shipment within 10-20 days
E-Book
05/2018
1st Edition
Routledge
€55.49
Available for download
E-Book
05/2018
1st Edition
Routledge
€55.49
Available for download
Person
Heather Merrill is Professor of Africana Studies at Hamilton College. Her research examines place, space, race, belonging, Black Europe and the relationship between Europe and Africa. She is an anti-racist critical human geographer whose theoretical work is grounded in ethnography of African Diaspora in Italy. She is the co-editor of Spaces of Danger: Culture and Power in the Everyday and the author of An Alliance of Women: Immigration and the Politics of Race.
Content
1. Witness to the Unthought Position: Introduction. 2. Africa-Italy: A Genealogy of Relational Places. 3. Black/black Spaces: Lived Experiences and Geographic logics. 4. Unarchived Everyday Violence. 5. Reading the death of Sylvester Agyemang: Can you be BLACK and bear this? 6. Grammar and Ghosts: Refugees and Migrants in Italy. 7. Re-imagining Future Geographies: Conclusion 8. Bibliography. 9. Timeline. 10. Glossary.