Red, brown, and orange artwork of faceless Black people in a crowd.
Journal Article
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Black in English: Race, Migration, and National Belonging in Postcolonial Italy

The discourse of “immigrants” draws from and feeds on the racisms of the past, the racisms that have affected people of African descent, of Native American people. So, it seems to me that the struggle for immigrant rights is the key struggle of our times. And it is a struggle for civil rights. It is a struggle for human rights.

—Angela Davis, interview with Derek Washington

An Ethiopian street vendor approached Italian activist and filmmaker Medhin Paolos and me in Milan during an interview I was conducting with her in July 2015 as part of my research on Afro-Latinxs in Europe.[1] “Buy this!” he said in English, showing us silk embroidery. When Paolos brushed him off with a polite “No, grazie,” the vendor exclaimed in surprise: “Ah! Parla italiano?” Since neither Paolos nor I looked white (enough) to be just Italian, the vendor explained, he had taken us both for US tourists. Paolos, who is used to justifying her Italian Blackness to locals and foreigners alike, explained to the vendor that her parents were Eritrean. Making himself more comfortable on a chair next to us, our new friend proudly congratulated Paolos on her English, stating, “A Black person should always speak English.” Unable to control myself, I interjected: “Why?” To which the vendor replied—in English—“Because Black in English is better.”[2]

As a light-skinned Afro-Latina living in the United States, I am all too familiar with the implications of language—accent, linguistic competency, bilingualism—in the constructions and perceptions of people’s racial identifications. In the framework of Latinx studies in which I situate my research and teaching, language is irrevocably linked to race and national belonging. For Latinxs, particularly Afro-Latinxs, speaking Spanish has, at times, allowed them access and privilege (helping Black Latinxs in the South to escape Jim Crow, for example), and at other times it has excluded them from larger conversations, actions, and even social benefits typically awarded to racialized minorities (scholarships, social services, a political space within the community, etc.).[3] The valuation of Spanglish (code switching, syntactic inversion, Latinx-specific cultural references) as inferior, defective, and foreign has also greatly shaped the scholarship, criticism, and literary production of Latinx artists and scholars in the United States (a topic recurrent in the artistic works of Gloria Anzaldúa, Josefina Báez, and Coco Fusco). Though most scholars of race would agree with the argument that there is a linguistic basis for race, the implication of such ideas—the linguistic construction of race—remains widely underanalyzed outside US Latinx studies. Linguistic translations, constructions, deployments, and performances of race, however, shape people’s everyday lives and experiences of belonging, particularly in the diaspora.

In the United States, where I have lived since I was a child, Spanish, Spanglish, and Latinized English have always outed me as an other Black. In Italy, however, my imperfect Italian combined with the physical indicators of Blackness (my kinky hair, wider nose, and pear shape), while clearly marking me as a straneira (tourist foreigner) of color, did not mark me as an extracomunitaria (resident alien). It was perhaps because of my newly acquired privilege as a US tourist that the encounter with the Ethiopian vendor surprised me. The dynamics of power that rendered Paolos’s Blackness foreign in the eyes of the vendor are linked to the Italian nation’s colonial histories of Black and Brown exploitation and present patterns of immigration in ways that assimilate aspects of the United States’ relationship to (Black and Brown) Latinidad. Paolos’s colonial relationship with the nation she calls home had to be translated to ensure her admittance into the nation-state—not unlike my own experience as an Afro-Latina in the United States. In other words, language—or, rather, the linguistic translation of racial belonging—makes the subject.

The street vendor’s enunciation “Black in English” underlines the intrinsic connection between language and race. The linguistic constructions of race— and its multiple cultural, political, and semantic translations—can simultaneously contribute to exclusion (Paolos could not possibly be Black and Italian) and to inclusion (English made Paolos a better Black or better at being Black). As a speech act, the vendor’s statement “Black in English is better” thus epitomizes the ways in which language (syntax, grammar, inflection, and lexis) and bodily performances (hairstyle, tattoos, attire, figure, posture, and body location) complicate our understandings of race. Paolos’s performance of “better Blackness” marked her as decidedly Western and educated, traits our interlocutor associated with the sanitized version of US Blackness that proliferates in the Italian media.

Caterina Romeo argues that in Italy the media has collaborated with the state in erasing Blackness from the collective imaginary. This “evaporation of race” sustains the hegemony of Italian whiteness that led to the vendor’s misrecognition of Paolos as a Black US tourist.[4]  Though the vendor felt a sense of kinship with Paolos through what Raimi Gbadamosi calls the “African Union” of the diaspora, he also understood his Blackness to be different from—worse than—Paolos’s.[5] As a recent immigrant, Muslim, and African, he experienced the everyday violence of state surveillance amid the widespread fear of terrorism and the ever-growing refugee crisis. In this global political context, the word “better” refers not only to Paolos’s economic privilege but also to her relationship with the Italian state, a relationship determined by Paolos’s presumed legal citizenship (whether as a US tourist lawfully present in Europe or as a citizen of the European Union) as well as by her successful performance of better Blackness (middle-class appearance, linguistic competency, cultural assimilation, secular clothing, etc.). The vendor’s misrecognition of Paolos’s Italianness must then be understood within the context of Italian racism, which renders Blackness as always foreign, ahistorical, and superfluous to the nation, a dynamic that is encapsulated in the term extracomunitari (people who live outside the community).[6]

Paolos’s “better” Blackness crystalizes the ways the state and the media jointly participate in the production and sustenance of acceptable and unacceptable versions of citizens of color.[7] Italy’s simultaneous engagement with global racism (evidenced by the coverage and debate surrounding the United States’ Black Lives Matter movement) and disengagement from local racism (which materializes concretely in the silences surrounding hate crimes against Black immigrants) solidifies the foreignness of Blackness, and in turn of anti-Black racism, in the nation.[8] In contrast, media productions of exotic and foreign Blackness (Caribbean and US popular icons) flood the entertainment industry in cosmopolitan and urban Italian culture.

Prior to our encounter with the vendor, Paolos and I had been discussing the growing popularity of what some call the “Black Italian” movement: a cultural and aesthetic drive led by the media and local politicians in their efforts to appear more inclusive to a younger, intercultural European constituency.[9] The marketing push for Black Italian employs US-produced slogans like “Black is beautiful” and showcases Anglicized terms like “nappy” as well as US Black popular culture and historical references in what Paolos calls a “three-way marriage of Barack Obama, MLK, and Diana Ross.”[10] Much like “Latinidad,” which, as Arlene Dávila argues, simultaneously produces Latinxs in the United States as hypervisible and invisible, “Black Italian” is a complicated term.[11] It names human and civic exclusion, but people continue to use it to demand access to services and opportunities that the state often denies them. Paolos explained to me, “Though ‘Black Italian’ is not my Blackness, I mean, my history is not that of slavery, my language is not English, my music and food are not American music and food, but . . . I am Black and I am Italian. And there are simply no other words in any language that more adequately describe me.”[12] In the absence of better words, Paolos and other “Black Italian” artists have began to translate the historical and cultural experiences of citizens of color in Italy through the use of hegemonic terms dominating the global political platform afforded by mass and social media (#Blacklivesmatter, #undocumentedunafraid).

This article proposes “Black in English” as a theoretical framework for understanding the ways linguistic constructions of race, immigration, and coloniality intersect to produce restrictive categories of citizens of color in contemporary Italy. Through the examination of a variety of cultural texts—public speeches, a novel, a film, and photographs—I ask: How does “Black” travel to Italy? How is it translated? That is, how are hegemonic racial concepts shaping the public cultural and political interventions of citizens of color in contemporary Italy? More importantly, how do these citizens of color, in turn, translate hegemonic terms to build local, transnational, and global networks of inclusion that can help them challenge the colonial legacies of oppression sustaining exclusion? Colonial histories shape the lives of immigrants and new citizens in metropolitan (postcolonial) locations such as Italy. But what happens when multiple colonial regimes interfere as diasporic communities negotiate multiple conceptualizations of race while asserting national belonging?

Blackness is both a local and a global construction that, though historically specific, also develops as a process of translation across geographies, histories, markets, and polities, through formal and informal channels. The hegemonic construct of Blackness is always situational.[13] However, as my encounter with the Ethiopian vendor illustrates, the hegemonic version of US-commodified ethno-racial concepts (such as Black and Latinx) dominates popular perceptions, intellectual discourse, social and popular media, and, at times, legislation outside US borders. “Black in English” shows the pervasive amalgamation of international hegemonic discourses of race and immigration that lead to new and more ubiquitous forms of violence against people of color. Yet “Black in English” is also beckoned to shatter the hegemony of white Italianness by summoning the language of globalized racial struggles on the public stage through cultural and social media interventions. In the absence of a mature political environment in which to discuss race and racism, the second-generation Italian writers, artists, and activists of color this article engages are leading the political struggle through a two-pronged cultural intervention. On one hand, their work exposes the silenced history of Italian colonization of Africa; on the other, it translates the struggle of Italians of color for a large global audience through a recognizable language of racial equality, immigrant struggles, African diaspora, and human rights. This dual intervention is leading to a rapid condensation of race, to return to Romeo’s metaphor, that makes Blackness decidedly Italian.

Black Postcolonial Italianità

Italy is not usually imagined as a colonial power. This is partly because it did not become a modern nation until 1861, and also because of a deliberate and conscious effort on the part of the state to “rehabilitate the national image that had been damaged by the events of World War II” through a suppression of colonial memory.[14] The obfuscating of Italian colonialism has allowed the nation to escape the kind of decolonial critique that proliferates in the US, French, and British academies.[15] The fact that Italy has been globally imagined as an immigrant-sending nation, a Second World nation, a Latin nation, and, sometimes, an “almost Southern” nation has also permitted it to escape political scrutiny.[16] Yet we need to remember that while Italians were immigrating to North and South America by the thousands from 1890 to 1950, the Italian Empire joined other European nations in establishing colonies in Africa. By 1914, for instance, Italy had annexed Eritrea, Somalia, Libya, and the Dodecanese Islands. Italy’s colonialism in Africa involved “land expropriations, forced removal of masses of people, the creation of internment camps and the ruthless and inhuman military retaliation against resistance movements, the use of gas against civilians and the enforcement of apartheid measures between white Italians and Africans.”[17] African colonization allowed a young Italy to find a sense of national identity in a deeply fragmented and culturally diverse territory through a language of dominance and superiority over its African colonies. The social, political, economic, and human implications of Italian colonization also shaped the nation’s understanding of race, citizenship, and culture, or what is widely understood as italianità. For Lombardi-Diop and Romeo, Italian colonization has greatly shaped the “new conceptualization of blackness that invests the very idea of italianità.”[18] That is, Italy is experiencing an epistemological shift from colonial silence to postcolonial memory. This shift is partly grounded in the transnational translatability of global Blackness as a category of contestation.

There is no other place in Italian society where this epistemological shift has been addressed with more frequency and thoroughness than in literature. Graziella Parati argues that immigrant narratives “talk back” and force Italy to recognize its past crimes in order to make room for this new multicultural Italy.[19] Similarly, Lorenzo Mari and Polina Shvanyukova insist on the significance of migrant literature in challenging mainstream homogenous interpretations of race, religion, ethnicity, and national identity.[20] The acclaimed 2010 autobiographical novel La mia casa è dove sono, by Igiaba Scego, is one of the most recognizable literary examples of “talking back,” as the author calls attention to the colonial foundations of italianità through a weaving of personal and national histories that link Italy to Africa.

Born in Rome in 1974 to Somali parents who emigrated to Italy following Sia Barre’s 1960 coup d’état, Scego situates in Rome the locus of Italian–African history. Rome’s streets are covered with African symbols: the Piazza Santa Maria sopra Minerva, with the iconic elephant statue by Bellini, and the iconic Obelisk of Axum are two of the most recognizable architectural symbols of this union. In chapter 3, “Piazza Santa Maria sopra Minerva,” Scego remembers the first time she noticed Africa in Rome. She had been walking around the piazza with her mother when she noticed the elephant statue. She asked her mother, “Ma siamo in Somalia?” (But are we in Somalia?). Five-year-old Scego had seen so many books about animals that she knew elephants were African. “Mamma rise. Mi disee che no, quella era ancora Roma. La mia confusion durò giorni. Allora Roma è in Somalia? O la Somalia si trova dentro Roma? Quelle elefantino africano nella città confondeva tutte le mie certezze” (Mom smiled. She told me no, this was still Rome. My confusion lasted days. So Rome is in Somalia? Or is Somalia somewhere in Rome? That little African elephant in the city was mixing up all my certainties).[21] The child’s confusion over the dislocation of the (African) elephant in Rome encapsulates Scego’s own displaced Black italianità. If indeed, as the author later states, East African and Italian histories are intertwined, their entanglement does not equal certainty of belonging in the nation for Black citizens like Scego, who instead have to navigate two competing epistemes and two cultural regimes. Making sense of elephants in Rome, as the scene with young Scego reminds us, requires constant translation.

The Piazza Santa Maria sopra Minerva is one of the most iconic churches of the Roman Catholic order of Dominicans. The name of the church comes from the fact that the Catholic Church was erected directly over (sopra) the ruins of a temple dedicated to the Egyptian goddess Isis, who came to be ascribed to the Greco-Roman goddess Minerva. The elephant statue, which Romans christened “Minerva’s Chick,” was designed by Baroque artist Gianlorenzo Bernini (1598– 1680) in 1867, shortly after the discovery of the Egyptian temple. Remapping Rome through Africa, Scego produces a revisionist cartography from which a reader can, if he or she so chooses, dig up the buried histories of unequal African– Italian entanglement that have led to the present-day alienation and dislocation of citizens of color. One of the most memorable moments in which this repositioning of colonial violence appears in the novel is through Scego’s remembrance of her “almost white” grandfather, Omar Scego, in chapter 2: “Il bianca della sua pelle mi ha posto questi interrogative irrisolvibili. Il bianco di quelle pelle metteva in crisi la costruzione che mi ero fatta della mia fiera identità africana. Nessuno è puro a questo mondo” (The white of his skin asked me unanswerable questions. The white of that skin called into question the proud African identity I had constructed for myself. No one is pure in this world). Perhaps because of that white skin, Omar had been able to learn Italian, securing a job as a translator for one of the most ruthless Italian generals in the early years of the Somalia Occupation.[22] Surprised and conflicted after learning about her grandfather, the narrator wonders, “Mio nonno allora era fascista?” (Was my grandfather suddenly a fascist?).[23] The tortuous deliberating about her grandfather’s fascism resonates with the legacy of the italianità many Italians seek to forget, but which continues to haunt the political climate of the nation.[24] Yet it was because of her grandfather’s alliance with fascism that Scego’s family survived amid the displacement and violence of colonialism. Her grandfather’s fascism, fatefully symbolized in his white skin, was the painful history that led her to the complicated roots of her own italianità. As the author grapples with the historical contradictions that simultaneously led to the expulsion of her family from Somalia and saved her family from the fate of other displaced Somalis, Scego inherits her grandfather’s trade, becoming a translator between the past and the present that have produced her Italian Blackness.

The work of second-generation postcolonial writers like Scego is part of a growing corpus of literature that, to borrow from Parati, “talks back” to the nation through intentional archival interventions aimed at confronting the violence of coloniality.[25] Scego is one of the most recognized voices of the second-generation Italian writers. She rose to popularity in 2005 with the publication of the short stories “Salsicce” and “Dismatria” in the seminal anthology Pecore nere (Black sheep).[26] The collection as a whole brought attention to the experiences of Italian Blacks and opened the path for a crucial—and overdue—postcolonial critique.[27] Stylistically, Scego’s La mia casa fits the framework of what Deleuze and Guattari termed “minor literature”: “the use of a dominant language and hegemonic cultural terms for political interventions on behalf of an oppressed collective.”[28] Minority writing materializes in Scego’s literary corpus through linguistic and cultural translations of Somali history to a mainstream Italian popular discourse: “We are Italian in each and every possible way. . . . [W]e have had a healthy overdose of Japanese cartoons. . . . We have seen singer Tiziana Rivale win the Sanremo music festival.”[29] For the Somali Italian author, the minoritized narration of her Black experience is also guided by a Du Boisian double consciousness resulting not from immigrant assimilation to a majoritarian culture but from an ancestral, visceral, involuntary bond to the colonial oppressor: “L’Italia era il mio paese. . . . L’ho sempre sentito profondamente mio” (Italy was my country. I have always felt it profoundly mine).[30] Scego is both Black and Italian because Italy is very much a part of Somalia’s history, just as Somalia is a part of Italy’s; the two nations are bridged by indelible colonial violence. In Somalia, “L’Italia è inevitabile” (Italy is inescapable) in the names of the streets, the light shades of Black skin, the language people speak.[31] In Italy, however, Somalia has been swept under the rug, hidden—like an elephant in the city—for only those who already feel the pain of displacement to look for and discover in quotidian encounters with the urban landscapes of Rome. Most importantly, Somalia is present in the Black bodies of Somalis who occupy the streets, stations, and parks of Rome, summoning the presence of Italy’s coloniality. In turn, postcolonial writing like Scego’s makes racism appear profoundly Italian as the stories uncover in the everyday life experience of Black Italians the specter of colonial violence.

La mia casa è dove sono poses a head-on confrontation with the epistemic violence of Italian racism: “Sono cosa? Sono chi? Sono nera e italiana. Ma sono anche somala e nera. Allora sono afroitaliana? Italoafricana? Seconda generazione? Incerta generazione. Meel Kalee? Un fastidio? Negra saracena? Sporca negra?” (What am I? Who am I? I am black and Italian. But also Somali and black. Then am I African Italian? Italian African? Second generation? Uncertain generation? Meel Kalee? A nuisance? A black Saracen? A dirty Negro?)[32] The opening “Sono cosa?” (What am I?) refers to the everyday life experiences of Italian postcolonial subjects who, like the author, remain inadmissible to italianità by virtue of the lack implied in the surplus “African” or “Black,” a symbolic space US Latinx scholars, following Gustavo Pérez-Firmat, have theorized as “the hyphen.”[33] Cosa (what) musters the objectification of racialized nonwhite citizens, as the word also means thing/object. To answer the loaded “Sono cosa?” Scego’s lexicon moves through the multiple, contradictory, and violent euphemisms for racial identity. The words travel in crescendo through the language of hegemonic identity politics—“Afroitaliana? ItaloAfricana? Di colori?”—ultimately arriving at a direct confrontation with the discourse of racial violence: “Sporca negra?” (Dirty Negro?). This linguistic escalation shows that politically correct and incorrect labels are both violent, for they carry the mark of human exclusion. Anticipating the discomfort of the white reader with the question “Non è politicamente correto chiamarla così?”(Is it not politically correct to call it so?), the narrator then challenges him/her to find a “better” name for Italian blackness: “Allora como mi chiameristi tu?” (Well, what would you call me?), pointing to the absurdity of accommodating white privilege at the expense of Black exclusion.

The terms that define Blackness in Italy (negra, nera, di colore) are part of a complex process of national identity linked to the internal—as in the separation of northern and southern Italy—as well as to the external borders guiding the Italian nation-narration. Much work has been done to shed light on the northern–southern dynamic of Italy, particularly as related to race and class. It is helpful to remember, however, when thinking about the racialization of migrants and citizens in Italy, that the coloring of the Italian south is a significant element in the Italian racial imagination. The growing demands for cultural diversity and inclusivity of Italians of color are thus very much intertwined with the hegemonic version of national identity that projects southern Italians as abject to the nation. Scego’s confrontation with the language of white privilege— through racial slurs and identity politics—suggests that naming Blackness in Italy is superfluous; all labels carry the implicit exclusion of “Sono cosa?” In such a violent lexical climate, what terms people use to name their exclusion becomes less important than how they use them. Scego’s Du Boisian speech act (“Sono nera e italiana”) is thus an assertion of her dual belonging that contests political conformity.

Like other second-generation Italian artists, Scego is invested in italianità. Yet this political investment contains an important critique of the Italian state’s disavowal of its postcolonial citizens (most clearly exemplified in the persistence of jus sanguinis citizenship) and speaks to the resulting doubly conscious existence of Italian citizens of color. Explaining how one can be both Italian and Black requires intentional interventions in the archive and the public that can successfully challenge the historical amnesia of Italian colonialism. Derek Duncan and Ekaterina Haskins both argue that visual “interventions” are particularly effective in public interpellations of dominant memory (monuments, memorials, libraries) because they facilitate evidential recognition and recollection.[34] Parati adds that film, particularly film about the immigrant and diasporic experiences of Italians of color, can effectively talk to the nation, placing the story of individual migrants at the center of a visual narrative.[35] The 2015 documentary film Asmarina (Milan, 2015), codirected by Alan Maglio and Medhin Paolos, offers a powerful example of Parati’s theorization. Through a visually stunning interpellation of the urban geographic memory of the city of Milan, Maglio and Paolos explain how the colonial violence that led to Paolos’s own doubly conscious existence continues to hold Black Italians as superfluous to the nation.

The film opens with images of the city of Milan in black and white. Many of the photos were borrowed from Lalla Golderer and Vito Scifo’s 1985 photo-essay “Stranieri a Milano” (Foreigners in Milan).[36] The black and white photos of “foreigners” in the city are juxtaposed with color footage of the ethnically mixed present-day Eritrean–Ethiopian Milanese neighborhood Porta Venezia. Golderer and Scifo’s photographs of Porta Venezia circa 1980 show quotidian images of Eritrean, Somali, and Ethiopian immigrants in various activities: ceremonies, picnics, taking the train, walking, going to church, etc. (Figure 1). Led by the photos, Maglio and Paolos embark on a quest to find the stories behind the “foreigners” of 1980s Milan. The result is an outstanding web of private and public histories, effectively producing a cohesive visual narrative of Eritrean Italianness that “talks back” to the nation. The various textual evidence, testimonies, interviews, and objects the film captures create an archival collage of the suppressed histories of Italian Blackness. As a whole, the film offers a more just and inclusive alternative for articulating italianità.

One of the most powerful interpellations of Italian colonialism appears early in the film, as the directors interview a family of mixed Eritrean and Italian ancestry. In their small apartment we find three generations of ethnic Eritreans: the grandparents who left Eritrea as adults, a daughter who arrived in Italy as a child, and the grandchildren, who are mixed-race children born in Milan. They all speak to each other in Italian. As she flips through the photos, the daughter, Elena Woldegabriel, becomes emotional: “These are beautiful! What a beautiful memory.” But once she overcomes her initial excitement, Elena becomes increasingly upset about the book title, or rather its contemporary implications:

We are foreigners, even though I speak perfect Italian, grew up here. . . . I am more foreign than an American who comes to visit and does not speak Italian. . . . Meanwhile we exist in the limbo of distrust they call diversity. . . . And then they speak about colonialism in a romantic tone like they do not know that colonialism is about war, about pain, about destruction.

The critique Asmarina poses by way of Elena shows how postcolonial subjects, often against their own will, become simultaneously Italian and excluded from italianità. The pain of coloniality Elena speaks of is visible in her own corporeal and verbal reaction to the photos: she cries, laughs, and gets angry as she flips through the images and remembers her own version of the stories these photos embody.

Elena’s reactions, in turn, beg for the viewer’s recognition of migration as the direct result of colonialism. If indeed East Africa and Italy are tied, as Scego suggests, this binding is uncomfortable. Colonial diasporic existence is thus, just like colonialism itself, always painful, an “open wound” (to borrow Anzaldúa’s celebrated metaphor) that can heal only with historical recognition.[37] The film’s interspersing of images from the present and the past, as well as the multiple voices of interviewees—newly arrived African refugees, white Italian historians, older and newer generations of ethnic Eritreans—further avows the colonial– migratory nexus as prevalent, ongoing, fluid, and unstoppable.

Alessandro Triulzi argues that Italian postcoloniality is simply coloniality in that “it continues to reproduce, 60 years after colonisation’s end, ambiguous displacements of memory in the politically volatile and unresolved public arena of both metropoli and colonia.”[38] The postcolonial critique, following Triulzi’s reasoning, must necessarily attempt to shatter the silenced history of Italian colonial violence and its lasting effects on people. This assessment is articulated in the film through the voice of Asli Haddas, an artist and entrepreneur of Eritrean descent: “If there is something in common among Italians, Ethiopians, and Eritreans, it is that we do not talk about the past.” Recognizing Italy’s colonial past, Haddas argues, can lead to understanding Black Italian belonging for second-generation italiani di colori (Italians of color) because the history of Italian colonialism traverses the nation’s articulations of race and national belonging.

In her foundational book On Photography, Susan Sontag argues that photography enlarges our notions of what is worth looking at.[39] Ekaterina Haskins, on the other hand, argues that digital memory (Facebook, Twitter, Google, etc.) “collapses the assumed distinction between modern archival memory and traditional lived memory by combining the function of storage and ordering . . . the presence and the interactivity on the other.”[40] Asmarina’s engagement with photography through multiple media as well as the film’s own strong social media presence (via YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter) has consecrated it as an important public monument of postcolonial contestation. Moreover, the film’s international success (evidenced in the directors’ appearances at international film festivals, as well as colleges and universities in Europe and the United States) is profoundly linked to its recognition as a cultural product of both the African diaspora and the immigrant world. The film’s successful engagement with global racial terms and its positioning of Italian alterity as a product of African colonialism suggest the ways in which new cultural products force Italians to recognize that colonialism shapes how the nation engages with ethnicity, citizenship, and race. For immigrants and citizens of color from the Global South, this dynamic means that they must grapple with the hyphenated history of African-Italian coloniality in their own struggle for belonging. Latin American migrants, particularly those of Afro-Caribbean descent, complicate Italian Blackness (and the Afro-Italian entanglement): although they are read as “Black,” their ethno-cultural assimilation to Italianness adds another dimension to the Du Boisian Black Italian experience Scego and Paolos depict in their works.

Triple Consciousness: The Black Latinx Nation

In their introduction to the seminal anthology The Afro-Latin@ Reader, Juan Flores and Miriam Jiménez Román present the term “triple consciousness” to explain the “Afro-Latin@” condition as a conjugation of race (Blackness), ethnicity (Latinidad), and nationality (US American) in the formation of subjectivity. Reminding readers that W.E.B. Du Bois saw the color line as a global rather than national problem, Flores and Jiménez Román also insist that Afro-Latinidad can be a bridge across the cultural divide separating Black and Latinx communities in the United States.[41] Following their proposal, I argue that the triple consciousness of Afro-Latinidad can be extrapolated to understand Latinx racializations, places, and displacements in postcolonial Italy.

The presence of coloniality, the legacy of slavery, and the persistence of US imperialism, particularly in the Caribbean, have greatly shaped Blackness in Latin America. In countries like Ecuador and Colombia, where the Afro-descendant population is smaller than the native and mestizo population, Black citizens are still fighting for basic recognition. Meanwhile, their governments promote multiculturalism and inclusion through tokenizing campaigns and through the institutionalization of positive gestures toward inclusion along with negative prohibitions against open displays of racism. Similarly, in predominantly Black and mulatto Latin American nations, such as Brazil and the Dominican Republic, the historical processes of nation foundation allowed for the continuity of colonial structures that divest the poor, who are often Black, from basic services and human rights.[42] Perhaps it is because of their palimpsestic colonial experiences that Afro-Latinxs in Italy are able to translate their triple consciousness and build transethnic alliances.[43] In Italy, Black Latinidad becomes the bridge Flores and Jiménez Román imagined, as well as a productive category of contestation, albeit one that remains connected to racially restrictive national immigration policies, political disenfranchisement, state violence, and poverty.

Latinidad became publicly visible in Italy as an ethnically differentiated category of exclusion for the first time in 1996, with the crowning of Denny Méndez, an Afro-Latina of Dominican ancestry, as Miss Italia. A controversy emerged immediately after the selection of Méndez by participatory television vote. Two of the pageant judges opposed the coronation on the ground of Méndez’s “inadequately” Italian look: “A black girl cannot be Miss Italia. . . . It is not in the rules.”[44] The “rules” alluded to by Miss Italia judge Alba Parietti—a former holder of that title herself—shed light on the anxiety that the question of race produced among many Italians as the nation struggled with becoming the recipient, rather than the sender, of migrants.[45] The controversy and overt racism of the judges surprised a world that was unaccustomed to imagining race and racism as an Italian problem.

Yet Denny Méndez’s “inadequacy” was explained not in racial terms but in cultural ones—a practice that, as Heather Merrill argues, has allowed Italy to justify racism under the “veil of difference that postulates absolute group identities and splits the human species into self-contained territorial and culturally fixed totalities.”[46] Despite her “difference,” Méndez won, was crowned, and went on to represent Italy at the world level. The international attention that Méndez’s coronation received led to a growth in the public conversation about the need for Italy to be more inclusive of its new citizens of color.[47] The fact that international media, including the popular Black US Jet Magazine, publicized Méndez’s crown as a “global victory for blacks” further consecrated Méndez as a symbol of global racial justice.[48]

Ironically, in the Dominican Republic, where there are many terms to name Blackness, Méndez would not typically be considered “Black.”[49] It is intriguing, then, that Méndez embraces “Blackness” and, more importantly, deploys the label “Black” as an international category of unity: “Of course I am Latina. And this beautiful skin makes me very much the sister of many continents. But most of all I am Italian. I am the new face of a better, more inclusive Italy.”[50] Méndez understands, as we can see in her words “this beautiful skin,” the political capital of “Black in English.” The massive international support she received consecrated Méndez as profoundly national; she was the face of a new Italy that resisted white supremacy. Her historic crowning as the first Black Miss Italia and, in particular, the opposition she faced because of her Blackness made Méndez a historical legend: an emblem of what could be possible.[51]

Though Méndez’s Blackness has been the subject of multiple studies about contemporary Italian racialization, the analytical richness of her triumph lies precisely in her personification of the entanglement of Black Latinidad in present-day constructions and productions of minoritized citizenship. The fact that Blackness made her Latinidad visible, and that her Latinidad represented Blackness, is striking, particularly in comparison with the dual disavowal of Afro-Latinas in US popular culture.[52] Méndez, who in the Dominican Republic as in Italy would typically escape the label of Blackness by virtue of her ethnicity—though without eluding racism—publicly embraced global Blackness in her assertion of Italianness: “But most of all I am Italian.”[53] In a clever weaving that resembles the hegemonic discourse of multiculturalism Italy had only recently began to exploit, Méndez’s embrace of Blackness is an act of political translation of the multiple colonialities that rendered her “inadequate” to represent Italy in the eyes of the judges: immigrant, Black, and Latina. Yet Méndez’s performance of “Black in English” is also an example of the social processes through which Black Latinxs make sense of contradictory racial terms, amid the globalized economy of inequality they are sustaining on their very backs. It also points to the urgent need to study Afro-Latinidad as a locus for articulating racial struggles beyond the hegemonic Black–white paradigm.

Over the past twenty years, Latinx scholars have been debating the productivity of the umbrella term “Latinidad.” In his foundational article “Inventing Race,” Silvio Torres-Saillant argues for the amalgamation of all Latinxs into a single race, in contradistinction to whiteness. The strategy would produce Latinx unity around policy changes rather than the merely representational Latinidad embodied in “Ricky Martin singing ‘La Vida Loca’ during President Bush’s 2000 inauguration.”[54] While warning readers about the dangers of the “repackaging of Latinidad” exemplified in popular figures and advertisement, Arlene Dávila also recognizes the political capital of imagining Latinxs as a collective race.[55] Although I agree with Torres-Saillant, Dávila, and others in their critique of Latinidad as a double-edged sword, I must contend that Latinidad in the United States continues to be profoundly Hispanophile. In contrast, Latinxs in Italy must first travel through Blackness—and by extension through the palimpsestic colonialities that regulate Blackness in Italy—in order to become visible in the nation and, by extension, in the world.

While Latinx is always synonymous with extracomunitari, exotic and foreign, Blackness approximates Italy’s uncomfortable and oft-silenced colonial relationship with Africa. The triple consciousness of Afro-Latinxs, such as Méndez, in Italy complicates the “racially evaporated” Italian colonial order. Afro-Latinx placements and displacements in Italy—and, by extension, in the European Union—bridge the migratory and colonial experience shaping the racialization and exclusion of citizens of color. Given that, as Afia Ofori-Mensa argues, “the national beauty queen can serve as a unique and exceptional repository for ideals of citizenship and national identity where notions of race, class, and gender can be negotiated or at the very least, imagined,” Méndez’s assertion of Black Latinidad in the Miss Universe pageant called attention to racial diversity—and in turn to racism—in contemporary Italy.[56] Her deployment of Spanish and “Latin” cultural markers further called on the possibilities of Afro-Latinx triple consciousness as a locus for intraethnic solidarity.

Linguistic competency, Catholicism, and widespread stereotypes about Latinx hypersexuality (Madonna/whore tropes) sustain Black Latinx difference in Europe. Enrico Mentana, the news director of Canale 5, where the pageant aired, articulated this difference in his assessment of Méndez as “neither the most beautiful contestant, nor the most beautiful foreign immigrant.”[57] It was not her beauty that attracted people’s attention but the fact that she reminded viewers of their desires: “She is exotic, like the women whom Italians who spend their vacations in Cuba find attractive.”[58] Mentana’s assessment of Méndez, an Italian citizen, as foreign and “exotic” further exemplifies the processes by which Blackness is rendered impossible in Italy. Black bodies are excessive, foreign, and immoral, and as such they cannot contain or represent, even symbolically, italianità.

The Black Latina in Italy can embody the complex dynamic of what Dennis Brennan termed the sexscape: a site for negotiating sexual encounters through a global and transnational economy of inequalities.[59] By 1996, Italian tourism and expatriation to the Caribbean began developing, and Italians began to be accustomed to equating Blackness with sex and/or labor, a process that encapsulated the Dominican immigrant woman within a limited, marginal space of consumption. The public resistance of the pageant judges, as well as the opinion of many Italians, reflected a keen understanding of the global and transnational economy of inequalities that made Méndez “inadequate” to represent Italy. The color of her skin meant more than a simple deviation from dominant Italian aesthetics of beauty. Méndez’s phenotype meant that Italy could be represented by the marginal, the poor, the prostitute, the foreigner, and the object of fear and desire—in short, by those who should remain outside the narrow definitions of italianità. Mentana’s disavowal of Méndez as a foreign prostitute exposes the continuity of colonial structures in the violent exploitation and exclusion of human beings of color. Newer forms of exploitation—tourism, settler colonialism, global capitalism—become intertwined with the language of immigration, terrorism, and the protection of national borders.[60]

Second-Generation Activists of Color “Talk Back”

In Italy, a country that does not have a tradition of pluralistic immigration and multiethnicity, finding a language of contestation for communities of immigrants and people of color is a complicated process of interpellation. Perhaps this is why many young artists have traded racial and cultural identity labels—Black Italian—for the politically situated civic category “Generation 2” or Second Generation. The term “second generation” summons the local and temporally situated condition of Italian-born descendants of migrants from the Global South who are often excluded—symbolically and politically—from italianità despite, as in the case of Africans from Italy’s ex-colonies, their postcolonial condition. The unprecedented growth in interethnic collaboration among grassroots immigrant activists and political groups in major cities like Rome, Bologna, and Milan has truly soared in the first two decades of the new millennium.[61] African, Latinx, and Asian Italians, for instance, elected Mercedes Frías, a Black Latina, to parliamentary office in 2005.[62] That same year, a group of multiethnic artists and activists from Rome founded the national grassroots youth organization Rete G2 (Second-Generation Network). Rete G2 became the most important network of political unity among Italians of color who identify with the umbrella category seconda generazioni. The main goal of these second-generation activists is the eradication of jus sanguinis (blood, lineage, and race) citizenship that persistently excludes Italian-born people of color from italianità.[63]

Italy is one of four European countries that reverted to restrictive forms of jus sanguinis citizenship as the European Union began to see a growth in its population di colori. Italian jus sanguinis legislation is particularly restrictive for children of immigrants from the Global South who are born and raised in Italy: “Whereas ‘foreigners with Italian origins only have to wait for three years’ and ‘EU citizens can become Italian after four years’ residence . . . non-EU citizens . . . must be able to demonstrate that they have been living in Italy legally and uninterruptedly for at least ten years.’” Second-generation children must also demonstrate that their parents have lived legally in Italy since giving birth to them. If all these conditions are met, they have a window of one year from their eighteenth birthdays to apply for citizenship.[64] Though citizenship by bloodline is not rare among Western and Southern nations, the significance of jus sanguinis in sustaining the exclusion of citizens of color is rarely examined outside legal studies.[65] Race and citizenship, however, have always been impossibly entangled categories of human exclusion.[66] The first recorded successful case against jus sanguinis citizenship was brought forth in 1857 against the United States government ruling that declared Blacks, even those born free, to be non-citizens.[67] As in the mid-nineteenth-century United States, the persistence of jus sanguinis in present-day Italy sustains the hegemony of whiteness.

The term italianità refers to people who share Italian culture, whether or not they reside within the national geographic territory. However, unlike other essentializing ethno-cultural terms, such as hispanidad, italianità does not rest on linguistic and cultural competency. The term excludes from the national identity descendants of immigrants from the Global South born in Italy, as well as colonial diasporic subjects and their descendants.[68] Grounded in the turn-of-the-twentieth-century eugenicist theory that was also used to justify fascism, italianità can never be acquired; it can only be inherited. The discourse of italianità renders Italians of color as, to borrow from Mae Ngai, “alien citizens”: persons who are citizens of a nation by virtue of birth or cultural assimilation but who are presumed “foreign by the mainstream . . . and at times by the state.”[69] The alien citizenship of second-generation immigrants di colori in Italy calls into question public discussion about the relationship between the colonization of the Global South and the supposed global immigration and refugee crisis. Or, rather, the refusal to legally and culturally admit new citizens of color into the nation (as seen in the case of Latinxs’ political and cultural exclusion in the United States and the denial of citizenship to Italian-born offspring of immigrants of color) crystalizes the prevalence of colonial structures in sustaining the internal borders of the nation through eugenicist-derived exclusionary notions of citizen-subject that are based on gender, race, class, and bodily ability.

For Medhin Paolos, as for many other Italians of color, the legal restrictions of jus sanguinis meant that even though she was born in Italy, she had to apply for Italian citizenship at the age of eighteen. Unlike the roughly 52 percent of Italian-born people who are denied nationality every year, Paolos was admitted to Italy and, by extension, to the European community.[70] After congratulating her, the immigration officer who delivered the news handed Paolos a little flag while saying to the Italian-born filmmaker, “Welcome to Italy.”[71] But as our encounter with the vendor shows, neither her cultural belonging nor her eventual legal acceptance into the Italian nation guaranteed Paolos italianità. The fact that she must continuously prove herself Italian (enough) through cultural performances and documentation is an example of how the nation-state participates in the normalization of racism through legal and symbolic actions. That is, the absurdity that allows an Argentinian who has one Italian grandparent to acquire Italian citizenship but denies it to the child of a legal immigrant born in Italy can be understood only as racist.

In a speech in front of the Milan Central Station in the summer of 2015, Italian-born Black Peruvian activist Jovanna Rodríguez better articulated the consequences of jus sanguinis legislation on young Italians of color:

I was born in Milan. I have traveled no further than Rome. I speak only Italian, and a few words in bad Spanish. I went to school here. I broke no laws. . . . Yes, I am Black, yes, I am Latina, but those are races, not countries. . . . Everyone deserves a country. . . . I know a piece of paper will not guarantee my happiness. But people in Italy need to recognize, and be aware, that my lack of this “piece of paper” limits even the most mundane of activities. That it erases me from this country in which I was born.[72]

Rodríguez’s emotional address in the context of the “Day of Multicultural Unity” during the 2015 Milan Exposition garnered applause as well as hesitation by a politically mixed audience accustomed to celebrating diversity while simultaneously excluding so-called diverse people from italianità. The young woman’s testimony merits deep analysis and discussion. At this time I want to focus merely on two of the premises guiding her speech: her performance of national belonging and her interpellation of Black Latinidad.

Rodríguez’s appeal to the audience—her fellow Italians—to recognize her italianità calls to mind Méndez’s 1996 coronation speech: “Of course I am Latina...and my dark skin makes me the sister of many nations... But I am most of all Italian.” Yet Rodríguez goes one step further than Méndez, arguing that the failure to accept her Black Latina Italianness derives solely from racism and prejudice: “Yes, I am Black, yes, I am Latina, but those are races, not countries.” The discomfort that her speech created within the festive empanada-eating, salsa-dancing audience further crystalizes how the legal implications that have led Rodríguez to simultaneously feel Italian and be exiled from italianità are mirrored by the social perceptions of italianità that guide cultural notions of citizenship and belonging. This dynamic was also exemplified in the street vendor’s surprised response to Paolos’s ability to speak Italian.

Latin American immigrants, particularly those of African descent like Rodríguez, grapple with different—often oppositional—racial systems in their quest for belonging and representation within the nations that exclude them. Latinidad in Europe, as in the United States, is often associated with immigration (extracomunitari), and more often with illegal immigration. This dynamic further marks Latinx exclusion from the nation. Situating her exclusion as a “racist act. . . an act of war,” Rodríguez calls on her fellow citizens to recognize their own complicity in their enjoyment of “a fake diversity” that does not threaten the supremacy of whiteness and its resulting privilege.[73] Like the coming-out speeches of DREAMers in the United States, Rodríguez’s is a performative act that asserts an alternative form of citizenship and belonging to the nation: one based on lived experiences rather than the law. This cultural citizenship, Rodríguez insists, is more sincere because it is based on shared ideas and values for “the nation we want rather than we inherited.”[74] But the hegemony of Italian whiteness gets in the way of unity: “If one closed one’s eyes . . . if one was blind,” Rodríguez continued during our hour-long interview after the speech, “my Italianness would not be in doubt. They see my skin and that tells them I don’t belong here, that I am not one of them.”[75] Rodríguez’s sociological analysis of her own displacement from the only country she has ever known is both illuminating and heartbreaking. The pain and betrayal she feels because of her rejection by a country she sees as so profoundly hers are matched only by the infinite implications of this exclusion in her everyday life. Navigating society without documentation is an immeasurably difficult undertaking.

Rodríguez’s assertion of Italian Black Latinidad illustrates how restrictive immigration laws produce new categories of racial difference that shed light on the nation’s vision of itself in relation to the world. These categories, as Rodríguez’s speech demonstrates, are linked to the historical processes that have marked the production of “alien citizens” for the last century: colonialism, exploitation, and migration. Second-generation artists and activists like Rodríguez, Paolos, and Scego bring attention to the relationship between race and immigration in Italy as linked to the historical contradictions of Italian colonialism and its prevalent effects in the current exclusion of citizens of color from italianità. Race and immigration in Italy are profoundly intertwined. Dislodging racism thus requires addressing Italy’s history of colonialism, fascism, north–south divide, and anti-immigrant legislation as well as the current effects of these histories on its citizens of color.

Conclusion

In her study of citizenship and illegal immigration in the United States, Mae Ngai urges readers to rethink the country’s immigration history in the context of global developments and structures in order to “dislodge the colonialists and superpower nations from their self-claimed positions at the center of world history.”[76] US expansion in the Caribbean since 1898, along with its military and economic involvement in Central America throughout the twentieth century, led to massive land expropriation, dictatorships, and violence against vulnerable communities. Similarly, Italy’s colonization of Eritrea, Somalia, and Ethiopia created apartheid systems that engendered ethnic clashes and intensified border conflicts and violence in the African nations. Yet Italian—and other European—discussion about the refugee and immigration crisis of 2015 rarely takes into account the relationship between the so-called crisis and the twentieth-century colonialism of the Global South. Ngai’s call to rethink immigration history, I argue, necessarily requires a deeper and more intentional examination of the ways US discourse on race and immigration intersects with that of other nations in the production and exclusion of racialized subjects.[77]

The nation defines its citizens through statutory regimes (granting citizenship to people born in the nation, those who have naturalized, etc.). However, legal citizenship has not sufficiently guaranteed national belonging, representation, equality, and justice for all people assumed to be citizens of the nation. Rather, the political actions of citizens of color and other minoritized citizens often force the nation-state to admit its failures and areas of negligence. In the United States, for instance, the DREAMer movement that gained momentum during the 2008 elections led to the passage of DACA in 2012, as well as to sustained institutional changes and public dialogues on the relationship between race and national identity.[78] Similarly in Italy, the political actions of the G2 movement also led to important advances in Italian citizenship legislation between 2012 and 2014.[79] Impressively, these advances were waged mostly within the cultural terrain, through a process of performative translation of US political struggles for racial equality.

The diverse examples I presented in this article point to the advantages of developing new frameworks of analysis that can broaden our comparative approaches to race, ethnicity, and migration while paying attention to the particular ways in which the experiences of racialization and immigration manifest in people’s lives and struggles. Yet as my conversations with Paolos and Rodríguez revealed, this process is intricate, requiring us to dislodge and translate the multiple ways the nation-state promotes acceptable versions of racial inclusion and how, in turn, people make sense of these labels to “talk back.” Rodríguez’s claim to Latinidad and Blackness, two categories produced and disseminated by the United States, also brings attention to the ways in which citizens and immigrants of color “talk back” and assert belonging through affirmations of the very categories often used to exclude them. Because of her race, which she defines as both Black and Latina, Rodríguez believes she is denied admission into italianità. But it is also because of her sense of political belonging to a global network of Blackness/Latinidad that Rodríguez has found a political lingua franca from which to translate her own position of exclusion to a larger, more supportive, and perhaps more powerful audience. In the face of state disavowal, Rodríguez’s political claim to Black Latinidad validates her right to Italianness, for these are “races not countries” under the universal principles of human rights (a right to have a state). Her speech exposed the state’s refusal to grant her italianità as a visible, criminal act.


Notes

[1] Medhin Paolos is the codirector of the documentary film Asmarina (Docucity, 2015). She is also one of the leaders of Rete G2, a national organization fighting for the citizenship rights of Italian-born second-generation immigrants. I contacted Paolos to interview her about her work as a political leader in the immigrant rights movement. We met eight times.

[2] This encounter occurred June 14, 2015, outside Café Rainbow in Porta Venezia, Milan, Italy, during the third of a series of six interviews that took place between June 10 and August 10, 2015.

[3] In Black behind the Ears (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), Ginetta Candelario traces a seldom-studied history of Afro-Latinx immigrants in Washington DC circa 1940. Her groundbreaking research, based on files, photographs, and recordings available in the Anacostia Museum of African American History, shows how Afro-Latinxs often escaped Jim Crow by using the Spanish language as a marker of difference. For more on the relationship between African Americans and Afro-Latinos in the United Studies, see Anani Dzidzienyo and Suzanne Oboler, Neither Enemies nor Friends: Latinos, Blacks, Afro-Latinos (New York: Palgrave, 2005); Miriam Jiménez Román and Juan Flores, eds., The Afro-Latin@ Reader: History and Culture in the United States (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009).

[4] Caterina Romeo, “Racial Evaporations: Representing Blackness in African Italian Postcolonial Literature,” in Postcolonial Italy: Challenging National Homogeneity, ed. Cristina Lombardi-Diop and Caterina Romeo (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 222.

[5] Raimi Gbadamosi, “Am I Black Enough?” Third Text 12, no. 44 (1998): 69–78.

[6] Though the vendor’s racial understanding, as a Black Muslim and a recent immigrant, is very much marked by the Arab/African episteme of racial identity, I would argue that his location and subject position—he is a street vendor who sells to tourists—and his migrant experience actually make him a very good judge of racial appearance.

[7] In the United States, for instance, this dichotomy materializes in the production of Asian Americans as a “model minority.”

[8] Many hate crimes have taken place in recent years, the most notable being the mass murder of six African immigrants in Castel Volturno by the Casalesi Clan in 2008 and the killing of Abdul Salam Guibre in Calabria the same year. There was very little media coverage of these crimes.

[9] The term is kept in English or Italianized English. See Judith Adler Hellman, Journeys among Women: Feminism in Five Italian Cities (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987).

[10] Interview with Medhin Paolos, Milan, Italy, June 23, 2015.

[11] Arlene Dávila, Latinos, Inc: The Marketing and Making of a People (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 5.

[12] Interview with Medhin Paolos, Milan, Italy, June 23, 2015.

[13] While certain concepts of US Blackness do, indeed, travel, this is a construct of hegemonic discourse within the United States itself: a close look reveals that any composite idea of US Blackness is easily contested once put to proof by regional, class, or even neighborhood singularities.

[14] Cristina Lombardi-Diop and Caterina Romeo, eds., Postcolonial Italy: Challenging National Homogeneity (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 7.

[15] Postcolonial critique has grown in Italy during the new millennium. The international attention gained by Lombardi-Diop and Romeo’s Postcolonial Italy has also placed Italian studies within larger European and trans-Atlantic conversations about race, ethnicity, and migration. Their theorization of postcoloniality draws attention to the coloniality embedded in the national project of italianità as linked to the present growth in immigration from the Global South. In that sense, the growing “postcolonial” critique of italianità fits more readily into the Latin American-Latina/o hemispheric approaches to decoloniality popularized by Walter Mignolo, Nelson Maldonado-Torres and Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel than into the Black European cultural and political critique promoted by twentieth-century Black Caribbean intellectuals such as Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire, and Stuart Hall.

[16] Eva Garau, Politics of National Identity in Italy: Immigration and Italianità (London: Routledge, 2015), 46–47. See also Graziella Parati, Migration Italy: The Art of Talking Back in a Destination Culture (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005).

[17] Lombardi-Diop and Romeo, Postcolonial Italy, 7.

[18] Ibid., 10.

[19] Parati, Migration Italy, 29.

[20] Lorenzo Mari and Polina Shvanyukova, “Re-negotiating National Belonging in Contemporary Italian Migrant Literature,” Ethnicities 15, no. 4 (2015): 527. 

[21] Igiaba Scego, La mia casa è dove sono (Milan: Rizzoli, 2010), 60. All translations by author.

[22] Ibid., 81.

[23] Ibid., 61.

[24] An example of this legacy can be appreciated in the political language of the North League, the right-wing, anti-immigrant, anti-Black party founded by Umberto Bossi (a minister for Federal Reform in the Berlusconi IV Cabinet). See Garau, Politics of National Identity in Italy, 111–113.

[25] Parati, Migration Italy, 29.

[26] Flavia Captani and Emanuele Coen, eds., Pecore nere (Rome: Laterza, 2005).

[27] One of the most significant recent contributions is Lombardi-Diop and Romeo’s Postcolonial Italy.

[28] Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 11.

[29] Clarissa Clò, “Hip Pop Italian Style: The Postcolonial Imagination of Second-Generation Authors in Italy,” in Postcolonial Italy: Challenging National Homogeneity, ed. Cristina Lombardi-Diop and Caterina Romeo (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 277.

[30] Scego, La mia casa, 19–20.

[31] Ibid., 43.

[32] Ibid., 33.

[33] Gustavo Pérez-Firmat, Life on the Hyphen: The Cuban-American Way (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2012).

[34] Ekaterina Haskins, “Between Archive and Participation: Public Memory in a Digital Age,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 37, no. 4 (2007): 403; Derek Duncan, “Italy’s Postcolonial Cinema and Its Histories of Representation,” Italian Studies 63, no. 2 (2008): 195–211.

[35] Parati, Migration Italy, 137–138. Parati argues that migrant cultural productions are counternarratives to the negative representations of migrants that dominate Italy’s public archive.

[36] Lalla Golderer and Vito Scifo, Stranieri a Milano: Immagini di una nuova immigrazione (Milan: Mazzota, 1985).

[37] Gloria Anzladúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Spinsters/ Aunt Lute, 1987).

[38] Alessandro Triulzi, “Displacing the Colonial Event: Hybrid Memories of Postcolonial Italy,” in “Colonial and Postcolonial Italy,” special issue, Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 8, no. 3 (2006): 441.

[39] Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Macmillan, 1977), 28.

[40] Haskins, “Between Archive and Participation,” 402.

[41] Jiménez Román and Flores, The Afro-Latin@ Reader, 4.

[42] The most recent and extreme example of this palimpsestic colonial dynamic is the passing of an immigration law in the Dominican Republic that effectively denationalizes over two hundred thousand ethnic Haitians. The law is retroactive to 1927, so it could potentially lead to the denationalization of three generations of the same family. As I argue elsewhere, Dominican anti-Haitianism and extreme border militarization are also triangulated with US imperial expansion over Hispaniola. The 1927 legislation to which Dominicans reverted in 2013 resulted from the suggestion and implementation of border policies the US Marines undertook during their occupation of Haiti from 1915 to 1934. See Lorgia García Peña, The Borders of Dominicanidad: Race, Nations, and Archives of Contradiction (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016).

[43] See Wendy Ann Pojmann, Immigrant Women and Feminism in Italy (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2006).

[44] Heather Merrill, An Alliance of Women: Immigration and the Politics of Race (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), xviii.

[45] Alba Parietti won the Miss Italia beauty pageant in 1979 and went on to represent her nation in the 1980 Miss Universe competition. She has since become an important television and movie icon. During the week leading up to the 1996 pageant, Parietti was temporarily suspended from the judging panel for comments suggesting that Méndez’s race made her ineligible to represent the Italian nation. She later claimed that she had been misquoted and was allowed to return as a judge. See Karen Pinkus, “Miss (Black) Italy,” Black Renaissance 2 (1998): 80.

[46] Merrill, An Alliance of Women, xviii.

[47] “La Miss Nera divide in due l’Italia,” La repubblica, October 9, 1996, http://ricerca.repubblica.it/repubblica/archivio/repubblica/1996/09/09/la-miss-nera-divide-in-due.html.

[48] Jet Magazine, “First Black Miss Italy Picked amidst Two Judges’ Disapproval,” September 23, 1996.

[49] There are many terms to describe Blackness in the Dominican Republic; the one to describe Denny Méndez would be india (Indian). See Lorgia García-Peña, “Being Black Ain’t So Bad. . . . Dominican Immigrant Women Negotiating Race in Contemporary Italy,” Caribbean Studies 41, no. 2 (2013): 137–161.

[50] Silvio Torres-Saillant, “Diaspora and National Identity: Dominican Migration in the Postmodern Society,” Migration World Magazine 25, no. 3 (1997): 18.

[51] When conducting interviews in Milan, I usually introduced the question “Do you remember when Denny Méndez was crowned?” as an icebreaker. To my surprise, everyone old enough to remember 1996 had a story and a claim to Méndez. One woman even said, “Everyone has a Denny Méndez story.” Interview with Milagros Guzmán, Milan, Italy, July 9, 2015.

[52] In 2013, a controversy emerged after Zoe Saldaña, a light-skinned Black Latina, was cast for the leading role in a biopic about the legendary Black US singer Nina Simone. The film’s trailer, released March 3, 2016, further fueled this controversy, as Saldaña appears wearing prosthetics, an Afro wig, and darker makeup in what critics are calling a “blackface” performance. As many call for a boycott, Saldaña’s opponents say the actress cannot adequately represent African American Blackness because she is Hispanic. Saldaña’s ethnicity makes her a different kind of Black. See Aisha Phoenix, “Colourism and the Politics of Beauty,” Feminist Review 108, no. 1 (2014): 97–105.

[53] See interview in Giordina Cristalli, “Denny Méndez, venti anni fa la Miss Italia di colore Dalla passerella del concorso di Mirigliani a Los Angeles,” ANSA, February 26, 2016, http://www.ansa.it/sito/notizie/cultura/2016/02/26/denny-mendez-venti-anni-fa-la-miss-ital- ia-di-colore_1776bf37-c613-4ac4-827d-29997a419aa2.html.

[54] Silvio Torres-Saillant, “Inventing Race: Latinos and the Ethnoracial Pentagon,” Latino Studies 1, no. 1 (2003): 123–151.

[55] Dávila, Latinos, Inc., 4.

[56] Afia Ofori-Mensa examined the connections among beauty, belonging, and Blackness in late 1990s Italy, using Denny Méndez’s Miss Italia win as a case study. She argues that modern beauty pageantry has always been a site of tensions and contradictions, and that in the context of Miss Italia 1996, these contradictions became more evident as the body of Méndez was equated with labor, sex, and immigration. See Afia Ofori-Mensa, “Naughtiness and Nationhood: Immigration, Race and Miss Italia 1996,” conference presentation, American Studies Association, Washington DC, November 7, 2009.

[57] Quoted in Michela Ardizzoni, “Redrawing the Boundaries of Italianness: Televised Identities in the Age of Globalisation,” Social Identities 11, no. 5 (2005): 510.

[58] Ibid.

[59] See Denise Brennan, What’s Love Got to Do with It? Transnational Desires and Sex Tourism in the Dominican Republic (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004).

[60] The Dominican Ministry of Tourism reports that Italian tourism to the Dominican Republic has grown steadily by 4 percent annually since 2000. More than 26 percent of Dominican tourism comes from Europe. Ministerio de Turismo, Data, http://www.mitur.gob.do/ index.php/2016-01-11-17-01-40/2016-01-15-14-27-54, accessed January 30, 2016.

[61] See Pojmann, Immigrant Women and Feminism in Italy.

[62] Mercedes Frías, another naturalized Black Dominican citizen, was elected as parliament representative through the country’s radical left Communist Refoundation Party, popularly known as PRC (Partito della Rifondazione Comunista).

[63] Rete G2, “Qui Siamo?” http://www.secondegenerazioni.it, accessed April 1, 2016.

[64] Clò, “Hip Pop Italian Style,” 25, quoting Chiara Marchetti, “‘Trees without Roots’: The Reform of Citizenship Challenged by the Children of Immigrants in Italy,” Bulletin of Italian Politics 2, no. 1 (2010): 51–52.

[65] One exception is the highly publicized draconian 2013 Dominican legislation that resulted in the denationalization of more than two hundred thousand ethnic Haitians (see footnote 42). La Sentencia, as the law was nicknamed, has led to multiple scholarly conferences, volumes, and cultural initiatives across the hemisphere.

[66] Lorgia García Peña, “Translating Blackness: Dominicans Negotiating Race and Belonging,” Black Scholar: Journal of Black Studies and Research 45, no. 2 (2015): 10–20.

[67] See Paul Finkelman, “Scott v. Sandford: The Court’s Most Dreadful Case and How It Changed History,” Chi.-Kent L. Rev. 82 (2007): 3. See also Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. 393 (1957).

[68] Dávila, Latinos, Inc., 13.

[69] Mae Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 2.

[70] Rete G2, “Articole e parola,” http://www.secondegenerazioni.it/articoli-e-parole, accessed October 3, 2015.

[71] Interview with Medhin Paolos, Milan, Italy, July 5, 2015.

[72] Jovanna Rodríguez, speech given during Multicultural Week, Milan, Italy, July 20, 2015.

[73] Interview with Jovanna Rodríguez, Milan, Italy, July 20, 2015. 

[74] Ibid.

[75] Ibid.

[76] Ngai, Impossible Subjects, 6.

[77] See Claudia Milian, Latining America: Black-Brown Passages and the Coloring of Latino/a Studies (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2013); Wendy Roth, Race Migrations: Latinos and the Cultural Transformation of Race (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012).

[78] Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) was introduced by President Obama in 2011. The immigration policy allows certain undocumented immigrants who entered the country before their sixteenth birthdays, and before June 2007, to receive renewable two-year work permits and exemption from deportation.

[79] Rete G2 has successfully forced the Italian state to implement a series of “know your rights” campaigns to inform second-generation immigrants about the various processes to apply for and appeal citizenship decisions. Most recently (June 2016), the network put forth a legislative plan that would do away with the most restrictive forms of jus sanguinis (parental status, minimum residential length). See Rete G2, “Home,” http://www.secondegenerazioni.it, accessed July 26, 2016.

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Colloquy

Black and Brown Intimacies Across Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean

European exploitation desires the black slave, the Chinese coolie, and the Indian laborer for the same ends and the same purposes.”

W. E. B. Du Bois “The Clash of Color: Indians and American Negroes.” The Aryan Path 1936 (2005).

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The rights of a coolie in California, in Peru, in Jamaica, in Trinidad, and on board the vessels bearing them to these countries are scarcely more guarded than were those of the Negro slaves brought to our shores a century ago.”

Frederick Douglass, “Cheap Labor.” Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass, vol. 4, Reconstruction and After, ed. Philip Foner (New York: International, 1955).

From pre-colonial Indian Ocean trade relations to postcolonial formations such as the Non-Aligned movement, from intimacies forged through the related colonial displacements of enslavement and indenture to contemporary mercantile migrations as part of neoliberal globalized orders, Africa and Asia have never been far apart. In their relation, multiple global narratives unfold. Reading Africa, the Caribbean, and Asia alongside each other reveals polycentric and multivalent histories.

Through an engagement with histories of colonialism, enslavement, indenture, and mercantile migration, shared movements and imaginations of decolonization, this colloquy examines how studying Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean alongside each other brings to the fore understandings and grapplings with race and ethnicity that are not always commensurate with or addressed by Euro-US frameworks. Through the work of scholars and artists who engage with Afro-Asian relations through political, religious, performance, linguistic, culinary and other forms, the colloquy draws our attention to the specificities of region, to structuring hierarchies of ethnic, linguistic, and caste affiliations, and invites us to engage with more granular histories of cross-ethnic and cross-racial relation, filled with the messy collision of connections and antagonisms, frictions and solidarities.  

Caribbean studies and Atlantic and Indian Ocean studies have developed nuanced and complex frameworks to study the dense racial, ethnic, linguistic, and cultural encounters and mixing in locations across the Francophone, Anglophone, and Dutch Caribbean as well as along the Swahili coast, and islands such as Mauritius, Madagascar, Zanzibar, and Réunion, among many others. Given disciplinary boundaries and silos, it is unfortunately rare for these frameworks to be studied together, so we might appreciate the rich encounters between a range of creole cultures without flattening continents and regions or only considering nation-state histories and trajectories.

In The Intimacies of Four Continents, Lisa Lowe recommends we focus on “the convergence of asymmetries rather than the imperatives of identity,” and, in an essay titled, “History Hesitant,” she calls for “retir[ing] the convention of comparison” to think differently “about the important asymmetries of contact, encounter, convergence, and solidarity.” Édouard Glissant sees collisions between cultures as productive of Relation, where in the multiplicity and diversity of beings in Relation, “each and every identity is extended through a relationship with the Other.” Our colloquy attends to histories of inter-ethnic and -racial conflict, and political and economic dominance and marginalization, which alert us to the fractious realities of these relations, and equally to political, artistic and other collaborations that attest to coalitional solidarity and sensuous intimacies.

By engaging with work that demonstrates historical depth, theoretical rigor, aesthetic experimentation, and radical political imaginations, this colloquy showcases studies of cross-racial intimacies, conceived as complex entanglements of the many affects generated by proximity. Transoceanic Black and Brown intimacy is under-researched and under-represented in scholarship on race and ethnicity. Our colloquy features work firmly grounded and invested in the people, ecologies, and histories that oceanic routes brought into contact, and the enduring legacies of those encounters.

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