Italian American studies has always been an interdisciplinary enterprise. As my object of analysis is literature, I have benefited from theories on ethnicity, critical race, and gender studies to inform my interpretive analyses of literary Italian Americana. For the purposes of this essay, I also reprise and extend Paul Lauter's organizing principle of pairing texts, a comparative approach that invites an intersectional analysis of how categories of race and gender undergird the structures of Kym Ragusa's and Claudia Rankine's experimental narratives (Lauter 1991, 39).1 I place Ragusa's The Skin Between Us: A Memoir of Race, Beauty, and Belonging (2006) next to Rankine's Citizen: An American Lyric (2014) in order to focus more fully on how these authors represent their narrators coping with the dominant culture of whiteness and also how they represent their responses to being racialized as other.2 I pair The Skin Between Us and Citizen less to show radical similarities in literary origin (as interesting as that is) and more to examine how their narratives highlight material circumstances that enable people of color to move about freely in public spaces in America and those that prevent them from doing so. This allows me to shift focus from any notion of an autonomous narrating self to a more nuanced contemplation of how the category of race affects women's movements on American soil and beyond. Employing this kind of textual analysis does not discard close reading practice, but rather involves my examining the authors’ resistance to acts of racism that have ruthlessly informed their lives and the lives of others, acts that, I argue, permeate their narratives.Pairing Ragusa's The Skin Between Us, a memoir well known to literary Italian America, with Rankine's best-selling and award-winning Citizen3 may also compel more analysis of Italian American literature, much of which elides the topic of race altogether, an apartheid mentality highly reflective of traditional American literature written by white authors.4Yet in their avoidance of racial realities and subjects, some authors and scholars of Italian America nonetheless reflect racial ideas in their works through the same institutionalized forms of separation between groups, reduced in the American imaginary to the Black/white binary.5 By focusing on Ragusa and Rankine in tandem, moreover, I hope to contribute to an increasingly productive conversation about the intersection of race and ethnicity and other vectors of identity, including gender and class, to deepen an understanding of how US-based literary writers theorize about these intersections through generic innovation. In this way, we may pull these conversations from the margin toward the center of Italian American literary studies.Subsequent sections of this essay demonstrate how both Ragusa and Rankine are authorially invested in localizing moments of racism; how they reference and incorporate visual arts to resist any label of aberrance due to their racial and social positions; and how in response to the historical experience of lynching that hovers over both narratives they construct what I am calling a chiaroscuro (from the Italian chiaro, “light,” and scuro, “dark”) imaginary, defying the Black/white binary in the American consciousness. I take the terms from the graphic arts of woodcut printing and from painting and drawing to describe a technique that uses light and shadow to illuminate three-dimensional objects and to achieve “photorealistic depth and tone” (Taggart 2020).6 I apply this artistic term conceptually through my textual analysis of Ragusa's and Rankine's narratives as an intervention and an invitation to open up Italian American literary studies more fulsomely to analyses of race and identity.7 Finally, Ragusa and Rankine incorporate examples of mobility as gestures of independence from the realities of racism: Flight becomes them both, enabling these authors to move beyond endurance and toward narrative invention that inspires their mobilities. My attention to mobility enhances the conceptualization of a chiaroscuro imaginary as it works to emphasize the differences between light and dark.Ragusa and Rankine are contemporaries, and both grew up in New York City, went to Catholic schools, and were university educated. Their similar trajectories also enabled both writers to move into the middle class and work as professional artists.8 Ragusa was born in Manhattan in 1966 and Rankine in Kingston, Jamaica, in 1963. Rankine immigrated with her parents to New York as a child. Both women were raised by immigrant parents and/or grandparents in the Bronx, though Ragusa spent parts of her childhood in Harlem and suburban New Jersey and Rankine in Jamaica. Both were sent to Catholic school, a choice often made by Caribbean immigrant parents and, earlier in the twentieth century, Italian immigrant parents.9 Rankine spent her elementary and secondary years in Catholic schools in the Bronx; Ragusa's mother enrolled her daughter in the Convent of the Sacred Heart in Manhattan, an upwardly mobile gesture and also a deliberate decision made by her mother to keep Kym safe.10 Ragusa is primarily a documentary filmmaker and Rankine primarily a poet, but both artists use multiple forms of media in their narrative works to explore how whiteness affects their lives and influences how they develop their literary genres. Applying the idea of chiaroscuro to an African/Italian American and a Caribbean American text invites us to rethink how we approach other literary works of Italian America in the twenty-first century.The historical experience of racial violence encapsulated by the American perversity of lynching hovers over The Skin Between Us and Citizen. I argue that Ragusa and Rankine, in different ways, critique the desire to repair the historical damage incurred by institutionalized racism in America.11 By referencing obliquely or directly the historical experience of lynching in this country, both authors frame their narratives around the potential of this violence to occur at any moment in a post-civil rights era. Both Ragusa and Rankine include catalyst events in their works that influence the kind of narratives they write. For Ragusa, the 1989 murder of Yusef Hawkins in Bensonhurst shadows her memoir, reminding her that Hawkins's death illuminates her own family's story, “writ large, and in blood. The policed borders of the body and the community. . . . It was my history, but I survived it” (224). Likewise, Rankine dedicates her section “My Brothers Are Notorious” to Trayvon Martin, whose murder largely spurred the formation of the Black Lives Matter movement. Rankine recognizes that she and her brothers might have found ways to rescue themselves, but their history, like Ragusa's, is written in blood, “where the pink sky is the bloodshot of stuck,” recalling a history of “passage, plantation, migration, of Jim Crow segregation, of poverty, inner cities, profiling” (89). Ragusa in particular highlights how her gender also makes her feel unsafe, aligning herself to women from both her African and Italian families who suffered egregiously from misuse of patriarchal power. In addition, Rankine emphasizes how her race intersects with her class in American culture, prohibiting some whites from seeing Rankine as a Black woman who is also a middle-class professional artist.In their personal experience stories, several of which I examine throughout this essay, Ragusa and Rankine portray their own intimate experiences with the treachery inherent in spaces that have been culturally and regionally appropriated by white privilege.12 Whether this space is a neighborhood, a seat on public transport, or a tennis court, Ragusa and Rankine portray themselves inhabiting precarious spaces, which imperil but do not prevent their movements, but have inhibited the movements of others they reference in their narratives. In this article, I argue that Rankine and Ragusa represent Black people compelled by white hegemony to function as racial “crossers” in quotidian spaces such as the suburban yard and the parking lot, both locations I will discuss later.What's more, Ragusa and Rankine are singularly defined by race in American culture, erasing their European and Caribbean backgrounds, respectively, disallowing the chiaroscuro of light and shadow in their self-identifications. It is worth recalling in this introductory section feminist scholar and poet Adrienne Rich's comment about that fact that, in America, racial politics begin at birth. Rich writes: “I was born [in 1929] in the white section of the hospital which separated Black and white women in labor and Black and white babies in the nursery, just as it separated Black and white bodies in the morgue. I was defined as white before I was defined as female” (Rich 1986, 215).13 Keeping in mind my own positionality within a matrix of race, gender, sexuality, and ethnicity, I examine how Ragusa and Rankine deploy their narratives in order to illuminate race and mobility in contemporary American culture.14 I argue that both authors insist upon their own physical movements to expose the onerous stress of living as women of color in an America bent on prohibiting their basic freedoms: walking on a public street unhindered; sitting in an airplane seat unscathed; traveling to a homeland country unjudged; and performing the basic functions of living in the United States without scrutiny from white people. In fact, these writers do not go anywhere without being hindered, scathed, judged, and scrutinized, and still they go. Their narratives thus focus generically and thematically on how persons of color negotiate a fraught terrain in order to deny an American culture bent on disciplining their bodies. Whereas Ragusa probes into her Calabrian/Sicilian/African heritage cultures in The Skin Between Us, by contrast, throughout Citizen, Rankine examines a variety of people whose cultural identity is reduced by white interlocutors to race.Skin. Memoir. Kym. Ragusa's The Skin Between Us announces separation from and connection to its emphatic subtitle: A Memoir of Race, Beauty, and Belonging. Like Rankine's generic experimentation, Ragusa's narrative advances a theory of race and ethnicity that exceeds traditional models of African American women's autobiography, immigrant autobiography, and feminist confession, genres upon which she innovates. Ragusa's memoir comprises a protocol of reading that is centrifugal in its force, advancing a nimble response to the binary of race.15 Thus, her memoir implicitly echoes African American women's autobiography from earlier centuries in its challenge to “Western European discourses on freedom and race. . . . For race (which also implied class) was the crucial ground which relations of power developed between black and white people” (McKay 1998, 96). Ragusa extends this crucial ground through a nuanced analysis of both sides of her family, refusing the binary that continues to be ubiquitous in US dominant discourse. Within a racialized American context, Kym's skin is the contested topography upon which both sides of her family map their own sociocultural positioning.In lieu of a genealogical tree, Ragusa documents family history by providing chapters separately focused on her Italian and African American families, in an effort to narrate the structural metaphor that undergirds her life: the Black/white binary, which Ragusa both illuminates and deconstructs in The Skin Between Us. Kym is a biracial child whose mother is African American with a genealogy that can be traced back to the perils of the Middle Passage and its accompanying evils of slavocracy in America, which the author examines in the chapters dedicated to her maternal forebears. Ragusa's father is the son of immigrant parents whose families fled Mezzogiorno poverty in Calabria and Sicily, braving the transatlantic journey to enter an unwelcoming America on the brink of passing landmark restrictions on migratory movements from Europe and Asia.16 Ragusa conceptualizes this apartheid structure through chapter organization, both illuminating and defying it in her cover art. The jacket photograph features a white child's crossed hands reaching toward a Black adult's hands, which embrace the left hand, and the child's white hand lies over the adult's left hand. The photographic chiasmus is a rhetorical device of inversion, suggesting a reversal of structures, as though preparing us for the paradox of symmetry, which is both a cross to bear and a crucifixion. The photographic lighting on the cover page is chiaroscuro in effect and illuminates the Black/white binary, softening it through the use of brown background color tones.17In the memoir, readers are introduced in chapters 1–4 largely to Ragusa's maternal history centralized in West Harlem; chapters 5–8 then shift to the author's paternal history, located originally in East Harlem, and referenced as Italian Harlem in the early twentieth century. Within all of these chapters is the existential reality of Kym Ragusa, the mixed-race daughter of African and Italian forebears, representing herself being shuttled back and forth between East and West and between maternal and paternal families. As Michela Baldo contends, Ragusa stages herself as the embodiment of Persephone, who must shift between the African American world of her mother's family and the Italian American one of her father's (Baldo 2015, 9). In the final chapter of The Skin Between Us, Ragusa seems to run roughshod over chronology and strictly binary racial constructions, but this is a strategy by which she unites both families through her mediation, culminating in a madcap scene in family court in which her parents must attend a proceeding to legitimate her parentage so that their thirty-three-year-old daughter can be issued a passport. Ragusa innovates on the photographic chiasmus of her cover page by echoing the crosses each of them have borne and have survived: “We stood before [the judge], my mother on the left, my father on the right, me in between. I looked at both of them. . . . When the judge said, For the record, how old is the child now? and my mother said, Thirty-three, the whole room erupted in laughter. . . . I laughed, too, at the absurdity of the situation, at how much it took to finally legitimize me” (232). In one of the unabashedly joyous scenes of the memoir, Kym embraces unapologetically the history of her family, which enables her to move forward in her life through travel to one of her ancestral homelands.By framing her memoir with a prologue and epilogue, moreover, Ragusa both compresses her complex upbringing in the racially segregated neighborhoods of East and West Harlem and also enfolds those locations into a larger geography that links her racial and ethnic background to what I will call her chiaroscuro consciousness, or, what Annarita Taronna (2011) describes as the author's “ethnography of Southernness” (110). Taronna argues that Ragusa's narrator “calls for a return to the South, not only as a geographical category, but as a state of mind, a horizon composed of histories, traditions, and values” (106). Ragusa thus encircles her family's diasporic history and spans the globe, beginning and ending in the land of her ancestors: “Sicily is the crossroads between Europe and Africa, the continent from which my maternal ancestors were stolen and brought to slavery in Maryland, West Virginia, and North Carolina. Two sets of migrations, one forced, one barely voluntary. Two homelands left far behind. Two bloodlines meeting in me” (Ragusa 2006, 18). Kym's southern return locates her at an intersection that links continents, illuminating two transecting world geographies to expose an admixture of cultural connections as a result of the multiple diasporas of her family. The author fuses her maternal and paternal lineages, reclaiming a legibility borne of multiple legacies of color. Ragusa ultimately embraces multiple identity positions in The Skin Between Us, including African American, Italian American, writer, documentarian, and granddaughter.A book by its cover may be judged. Rankine's book cover reads: CITIZENAN AMERICAN LYRICCLAUDIA RANKINEThe cover page of Rankine's Citizen reflects the Black/white binary of American racial ideology, with hints of gray on the cover art. Citizen's cover art features David Hammons's 1993 In the Hood, an “athletic sweatshirt with wire,” as it is named. However, it is actually a hood shorn from its sweatshirt, as Ismail Muhammad explains, and it “evoked the 2012 murder of Trayvon Martin” (2020). This event serves as the catalyst for Rankine's book-length prose poem. The tip of the hood appears to be grayish; and on the side above the title we see a stamp of the National Book Award seal, indicating that Rankine's book was a finalist, the medallion a color of light gray with the lettering in black.18 Throughout Citizen, Rankine incorporates graphics, archival photographs, art reproductions, and scripts with a variety of images to explore the manifold ways in which the language of insult infiltrates into ordinary conversations and at multiple public locations. Rankine then offers examples from her own life experience and those of others in American society that encapsulate a microcosm of casual racism, which the author then fully explores intertextually through an implicit conversation between the images and her prose. Throughout Citizen, Rankine examines the visual act of non-seeing against a background of hypervisibility for Black women that reproduces racial politics in, for example, women's sports and in particular the sport of tennis and the Black body on the tennis court.Citizen is divided into seven sections (and subdivided within each section by specific dates), mimicking the paratextual features of a prologue and epilogue when Rankine returns in her conclusion to the “scene of the crime”—a tennis court—with only herself as the focus of ill will. As if to reinforce the chiaroscuro imaginary enveloping Citizen, Rankine ends her narrative with two images by Romantic-era landscape painter Joseph Mallord William Turner: The Slave Ship and Detail of Fish Attacking Slave from The Slave Ship (circa 1840). J. M. W. Turner was a practitioner of chiaroscuro, and his paintings featured intense light in nocturne maritime depictions; Rankine's inclusion of the The Slave Ship emphasizes intense light out of metaphorical darkness as this painting features a brilliant use of chiaroscuro as though painted in a haze of fire during the day, echoing the final words of her text, to which I shall return in the conclusion.In addition, Rankine's decision to include “situation videos” of “mind-numbing moments of injustice—the aftermath of Katrina, for example, or juries letting supremacists off with a slap of the wrist for killing black men,” permits her access to a “kind of seeing that is highly developed in the visual artist” (Berlant 2014, 4). In order to reinforce the ongoing experience of racist behavior, Rankine reenacts moments of “unfreedoms” (Berlant 2014, 4) indwelling in the bodies of Black people in the most quotidian of ways: sitting on a train, for example, the activity of taking public transportation resonating with historical gravitas. The first image Rankine includes in Citizen that implicitly suggests unfreedom is a 2007 photograph, Jim Crow Road (showing a street sign bearing that name), which functions as an interception: Before you try to interpret my story, the author seems to be saying, I intercept it with an image that recalls the history of enforced racial segregation, and, as the author explains, “stands in place of my text” (Berlant 2014, 7). The autobiographical story Rankine shares in this first chapter must then be read through the lens of critical race studies: When Rankine is twelve years old, a white girl who sits behind her in the classroom requests that Claudia sit far to her right so that the girl can cheat and take the answers from her exam. Though the nun, Sister Evelyn, who teaches the class is no stranger to humiliation (she tapes the students’ failing grades to the coat closet doors), never once does she suspect dishonest behavior from the white student. Rankine suspects in retrospect that perhaps the nun “never actually saw [Claudia] sitting there.” Both public spaces, the classroom and a street sign in suburban Georgia, shimmer with the unbearable banality of violence displayed by willfully not seeing a child in the classroom or not perceiving the malevolence inspiring the installation of this street sign, which might better have been named “James Crow” (Berlant 2014, 7).19The Jim Crow image anticipates Rankine's visual interception of the most iconic photo of lynching in America. The 1930 photo Public Lynching is altered in Citizen to reveal a cropped photo in black and white, the sole image on page 90 of Rankine's book. The page is bifurcated in white and black, and the focus of the cropped photo shifts to the spectacle of white people staring at the camera, one pointing an index finger upward into the dark night. The iconic photograph has barred a certain kind of entrance into Rankine's text; rather, the image is unsettled by the alteration and destabilized by the author's prose that refuses to say goodbye to her brothers, asking them to wait with her: “Wait with me though waiting might be the call of good-byes” (Rankin 2014, 90). An experimental poet, Rankine not only displays a “kaleidoscopic aesthetic” that draws from reportage, photography, and visual art, but she also uses a voice that reads like an embrace from a sister, calling her brothers home (Muhammad 2020). The next two sections of this essay focus on how each author explores and manages the challenges of living in an American society in which white supremacy pervades their daily lives.Ragusa's The Skin Between Us was published a decade after making her short documentary Fuori/Outside.20 In her memoir, Ragusa expands on her stories and memories of her maternal Black family alongside her paternal Italian family's history, both of which are ancestral stories of physical movements. While the short film focuses on her adult relationship with her ill paternal grandmother, the memoir takes off from that film, encapsulated by the sole photo Ragusa includes at the beginning of the book of herself at the kitchen table with both grandmothers. I use the idiom “take off” quite deliberately, to suggest both departure and flight. I will return to the idea of physical movement through what I believe is Ragusa's progressive realization of her own borderlands imaginary.21 Ragusa's accounts of her childhood are at best fragments, compelling her to perform other kinds of narrative work, including archival research about the neighborhoods in which she was shuttled back and forth in childhood. Her memories are marred by gaps and silences, but Ragusa continues to compose narratives about both sides of her family. As Jessica Maucione (2008) writes, “These efforts are often frustrated, and so the memoir more accurately maps the desire for a usable past than its construction” (230). To actualize a Mediterranean consciousness that embraces a chiaroscuro awareness, Ragusa must flesh out and imagine the stories and memories of her maternal ancestors, from evoking into history a great-great-great-great-grandmother who escapes slavery in the South, to her grandmother Miriam, a journalist who wrote columns in the 1950s and 1960s for Black newspapers in Los Angeles and (West) Harlem and raised her only child, Kym's brilliant and beautiful mother, who becomes a fashion model in Europe and an Italophile.22The Skin Between Us ushers in an early awareness of Kym's racialized body in spaces inhabited primarily by white people, including her Italian side of the family. As a child, she is subjected to racist commentary by white children, for example, when playing with her paternal cousin outside at dusk in a New Jersey suburban neighborhood. Without the dubious but supportive response from her cousin, who feels compelled to deny her racial identity in an effort to protect her, she remains in this scene unharmed, at least physically. As she admits, “My skin only caused trouble—it was always too light or too dark, always a problem” (Ragusa 2006, 109), echoing W. E. B. DuBois's famous question of the twentieth century, “How does it feel to be a problem?” ([1903] 1997, 37). Added to that, Ragusa implicitly asks, how does it feel to be outside the interiority of her Italian American family, looking in through the window?23Ragusa's ultimate survival as a biracial child depends mightily on her maternal grandmother's and mother's covert protection of her, which Kym learns about only as an adult. While Ragusa shares information about her childhood memory at her cousin's house, she only later recognizes the extent to which she was protected. Similar to Rankine's use of a second-person point of view, Ragusa shares these revelations with the reader as though they were just occurring to her in the present, thus connecting past memories to an ongoing presence of such realities. As is true of all writers of memoir, Ragusa's narrative identity is marked by duality. She deftly links past memories to present recognitions to encourage a rethinking by her readers about race and space; in doing so, her narrative feels as though it were written in a constant state of the present with an emotional voice of the subjunctive throughout The Skin Between Us: if I were more protected; if I had been more aware and more accepted by my Italian family. While implicitly rhetorical and understated, such conditional intimations invite new thinking about race and places of belonging in American culture. In fact, Ragusa's travel to Sicily is inspired by her African American grandmother Miriam, who shares the myth of Persephone with her granddaughter and whose own searches for the maternal trigger her voyage to Italy.24 Despite feeling she wants to climb out of her skin, “to be invisible,” while on the ferry crossing the Strait of Messina, Kym is not deterred by experiencing the hypervisibility that comes with her mixed-race heritage and her status as a woman traveling alone (Ragusa 2006, 19).Ragusa's paternal ancestral story also includes physical movement and escape: the migration story of her great-grandmother Luisa, who migrated to New York from a small village in the mountains of Calabria; and that of her grandmother Gilda, the first child to be born in America, who struggled to feel comfortable in Italian (East) Harlem and later in a New Jersey suburb, overshadowed and controlled by her exceptional but dominating mother. Unsurprisingly, Ragusa's chapters about her maternal and paternal sides of the family are as separated as the neighborhoods of East and West Harlem. After the prologue and first chapter, Ragusa focuses the next three chapters (chapters 2 through 4) on her mother's family, ending with the mild but lasting estrangement between Ragusa's grandmother and her mother, who leaves Ragusa and rents an apartment in the West Village, one of many moves that takes her away from conventional motherhood and toward her modeling career, which relocates her to Rome.With no further commentary about the rift Kym saw as a six-year-old between her grandmother and mother after her mother moves out, Ragusa shifts her focus in chapters 5 through 6 onto her father's family. In these chapters, the author recalls memories culled from family stories and census figures of East Harlem to imagine her paternal ancestors’ lives before they all moved to the Italian Bronx once the family matriarch, Luisa, dies. Ragusa vividly recalls her grandmother Miriam dressing Kym in her Sunday best to meet Luisa in East Harlem, shortly before Luisa dies. As if in homage to the mythologizing of the old neighborhood, Ragusa ends this section by describing her adult participation in the Feast of the Madonna of Mount Carmel, walking in the procession with Italians, Haitians, Puerto Ricans, and Mexicans, feeling shame for not knowing “the words of any of the songs, in any language” (Ragusa 2006, 144).Ragusa's participation in the procession, however, anticipates the final third of her memoir (chapters 7 through 9) in which traveling back and forth between locations and families can neither be divided neatly nor left unexplained. The author reveals uncensored information about both Black and Italian families and neighborhoods, challenging falsehoods about location vis-à-vis notions of safety. For example, Ragusa learns from her paternal aunt that her childhood friend from the Italian Bronx neighborhood was raped one night on her way home (Ragusa 2006, 182). She also deciphers that her grandmothers (Gilda and Miriam), both othermothers25 to their granddaughter, had a hand in removing Kym from her Maplewood, New Jersey, home (part of the Italian family's white “ethnic” flight from the city) in an effort to protect her from conflicts between Kym's father and grandfather. Ragusa forthrightly informs us of her father's addiction to heroin, initiated under napalm skies in Vietnam (114). His parenting is foreclosed and symbolizes yet another abandonment from which the author suffers.In Ragusa's world, Gilda and Miriam function as othermothers to Kym and begin their “long-distance friendship” when Ragusa is twelve years old and on the brink of womanhood and lacking proper support from parental figures.26 Ragusa learns that her mother had been the primary agent involved in protecting her daughter behind the scenes, for it was she “who made the final decision” for Kym to move back to Harlem, returning from Italy “to set me up in school in New York as soon as she found out what happened between my father and Luigi,” her Sicilian grandfather (Ragusa 2006, 217).27Ragus