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t’s a pleasure to write a commentary on Dr. Camilla Hawthorne’s book, Contesting Race and Citizenship: Youth Politics in the Black Mediterranean. Hawthorne’s study of race, difference, youth politics, and activism grapples with the tensions and possibilities that emerge from multi-generational, multi-ethnic, and multi-nation organizing in 20^th and 21^st century Italy. As Hawthorne writes in the introduction, “Contesting Race and Citizenship asks why and how so many Black Italians have adopted national citizenship as a privileged terrain of struggle over racial justice, inclusion, and belonging in Italy. In this book, I argue that citizenship—and specifically, the long-standing debate about the legal inclusion of Black subjects within European polities—is key to understanding the connection between subtler, late-twentieth century ‘color-blind’ or ‘cultural’ racisms and the resurgence of overt racial nationalisms during the last decade”(Hawthorne, 2022: 3). As the author notes, these struggles and debates were only exacerbated following the emergence of COVID-19 in 2020 and the collapse of the Italian government in 2022. I certainly look forward to Hawthorne’s ongoing work about her interlocutors’ reactions and mobilizations in the wake of these two seismic events.

I was quite taken by the initial categories that Hawthorne uses to describe the approaches to, and frameworks for, contesting citizenship: strategic alliances and engagement with the State to gain access to the formal rights afforded by citizenship; swerving the concept outside the realms of jus solis (right of birth) and jus sanguinis (right of blood), and stretching citizenship beyond these categories to account for the bonds produced by culture and language. I’d like to build on some of the parallels Hawthorne draws between the struggle for citizenship, the process of racialization, and the making and re-making of the State in post-Risorgimento Italy and in the post-Reconstruction United States. These parallels are really not intended to create a list of best practices or a “who is doing Black liberation better” contest, but really just to help me draw connections and understand some of the challenges of the world project of anti-Blackness.

I also appreciate Hawthorne’s early problematizing of Blackness in Italy, and the formation of a problem-space where activists struggle to engage, swerve, and stretch the meanings of nation-state belonging and citizenship. She writes that “there are alternative ways that Black activists in Italy today are drawing on the unique histories of racial formation in the Mediterranean. They are not holding up the Mediterranean as a racially innocent category, nor are they merely positioning themselves as the newest form of “diversity” to join Italy’s vast Mediterranean melting pot” (Hawthorne, 2022: 129). This melting pot analogy of Italy and the broader Mediterranean reminds me a bit of California, and even the US more broadly, as a place where facile liberal politics dominate – until the “threat” of immigration creates new demands (and opportunities) on the liberal welfare state. The state of California has produced some of the strongest urban social movements – from striking farm workers, to the Black Panther Party, to the recent strikes of the teachers and workers of the Los Angeles Unified School District. All of these groups are making claims on the State, largely in support of its nonwhite residents who deserve equal benefits and rights to the welfare state, but whose claims and belonging are challenged by “white” elites who settled in recent centuries.

The problem-space in itself is a space of contestation, with struggles between different categories of the Black diaspora – with the children of immigrants, immigrants, refugees, and stateless peoples as the primary contest. Much like the Black liberation problem-space of the United States, which is also marked by these categories, but perhaps even more so by class divides which are connected to one’s ability (or one’s family’s ability) to create strategic alliances and engagement with the State – the contestation becomes more about “solving” the problem-space before solving the "problem” of Blackness in non-diasporic countries. The alleged “problem” of Blackness in non-diasporic countries is the ongoing contestation for members of the Black diaspora to be viewed as full citizens with full access and opportunities to the rights of their home country. These tensions emerge and materialize through racial disparities across access to stable income, housing, education, and health care – regardless of class or citizenship status. Patterns across Western countries suggest that as these rights are obtained through strong federal intervention, local and state governments move in concert to roll them back – what Carol Anderson terms as the backlash of white rage (Anderson, 2016).

I further appreciate Hawthorne’s interjection of her personal life and identity throughout the book. A child of a Black American father and white Italian (Bergamasca) mother, with dual citizenship and American residency, this puts her in a unique position that challenges the conventional understandings of citizenship for both Americans and Black Italians. The vignettes scattered throughout the text provide the reader with the laughable contradictions and limitations of these categories, but also allow for the perspective of an outsider-insider that is needed as we navigate these complex issues. Not many people do that type of intimate interior work, and I am grateful to the author for doing so.  

Strategic Alliances and Engagement with the State

Early migrants to new lands tend to rely on strategic alliances and engagement with the State. This is by necessity, I think, as just to work, live, and love in these new lands requires documentation and engagement with bureaucracy, even if it doesn’t leave much room for difference or others behind you. I am reminded that one of the earlier pushes for citizenship by the Rete G2 in 2011, the L’Italia Sono Anch’io campaign – the group’s first major action to collect 50,000 signatures (required to get legislation in front of Parliament) – was in coalition with labor unions. The campaign successfully collected 200,000 signatures to grant automatic citizenship to children born to immigrants in Italy and decrease the naturalization residency requirement from 10 to 5 years.

In 2015, the legislature’s lower chamber approved a citizenship bill that combined elements from L’Italia Sono Anch’io’s proposal with 20 other proposals. Key differences included allowing people older than 18 to retroactively apply for citizenship, eliminating the reduced residency time for naturalization, requiring at least one parent to have a long-term residency permit, and requiring an Italian language test. The lower chamber’s proposal emphasized jus culturae (right of culture) citizenship acquisition – which linked citizenship to the completion of school (either as child or teenager) and/or a high school or vocational diploma. These strategic alliances and engagements thus resulted in major concessions, and even further created divisions that exacerbated divides within the problem-space. They also created new problems – a reliance on cultural attempts to deracialize – but Hawthorne rightfully invokes Stuart Hall’s claim that “culture and race are really just ‘racism’s two registers’” (quoted in Hawthorne, 2022: 43).

Hawthorne later introduces the concept of strategic entanglement from Yarimar Bonilla, which looks at ways of engaging with the State and liberal conceptualizations (and limitations) of citizenship for Black diaspora – “alternative forms of Black political organizing, ones that do not regard citizenship or nation-state recognition as the primary or singular objective”(Hawthorne, 2022: 161). This strategic entanglement takes the focus away from the problem-space and instead problematizes the concept of the nation-state and State projects more broadly.

Swerving Around Conventional Understandings of Citizenship

In the fifth chapter, Hawthorne introduces the notion of Black Mediterranean diasporic politics: “This emergent Black Mediterranean diasporic politics aligns with W. E. B. Du Bois’s prophetic vision in Dusk of Dawn of political community based not on the fascist dyad of blood and soil, but on shared social histories of subordination and resistance” (Hawthorne, 2022: 161). I consider this a swerve because it is not meant to be an all-encompassing, “let’s all get along” approach to Black European organizing. Rather, it seeks to understand the collective struggle for any member of the Black diaspora in an increasingly anti-Black world that pushes towards inclusion at the expense of Black humanity and for the benefit for “post-racial,” liberal nation-states (and the militant policing complexes supporting these states).

Swerving citizenship in Italy is useful because of the diversity in Black diaspora and Black diasporic routes. Hawthorne’s discussion of Eritreans’ (and this can apply to other lands colonized by Italy) struggles and journeys from the continent to Italy (and back again) demonstrates how migration (and thus, nation-state belonging) are not linear processes, but circuits. I think this is a helpful contribution to the Black Mediterranean as an analytical framework.

Stretching the Meaning Citizenship

The early chapters of this work spend a bit of time with youth activists who are constantly constructing and reconstructing Blackness, Italianness, and citizenship in ways to better articulate their diverse experiences while also providing some unifying frameworks to categorize their political demands and actions. While there are differences between generations, nationalities, class, gender, sexuality, and documentation status, there is some promise that working together instead of creating cleavages and new associations and organizations is the path forward. I was heartened to see the Rete G2 reach out to younger Black Italians to build up new organizers and eventual leaders, the lack of which has made Black liberatory movements less tenable and less intergenerational over time in the US.

As Hawthorne writes, “Today, the Mediterranean simultaneously represents the promise of a postracial future and a source of racial contamination; it is an alibi to deflect accusations of anti-Black racism and a way to create space for Black people within the Italian nation” (2022: 96). We see this in the wake of the death of Emmanuel Chidi Nnamdi in 2015, which brought together migrants, refugees, and the Italian-born/raised children of African and Afro-Latinx immigrants in protest against the virulently racist and fascist responses to this hate crime, unifying members of the problem-space against the problem of the nation-state. This horrifying incident also illustrated some of the gendered ways that racism, xenophobia, and disbelonging occur in many places – Black men are usually met with violent outbursts and outright murder, while Black women are shamed, dissected, and banished. Emmanuel’s wife Chinyere had to be removed from their sanctuary home in Fermo to another town following the attacks on her personal self, her testimony about the crime, and her character.

I’ve learned so much from this work about categories – the nation-state, citizenship, time-space, and diaspora – and the rightful contestations that keep these categories dynamic to stretch, swerve, and become strategically entangled with the many lived experiences of our lives. It’s been a privilege to engage with this work alongside other scholars, and I truly look forward to the expansion and application of the Black Mediterranean framework in other works studying Black liberation movements across the globe.

References

Anderson C (2016) White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide (First Dutch Edition). Bloomsbury USA.

Hawthorne C (2022) Contesting Race and Citizenship: Youth Politics in the Black Mediterranean. Cornell University Press.

Akira Drake Rodriguez is an Assistant Professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Weitzman School of Design.  She is the author of Diverging Space for Deviants: The Politics of Atlanta’s Public Housing, which explores how the politics of public housing planning and race in Atlanta created a politics of resistance within its public housing developments.