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.