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s someone who has spent the majority of their life in the US South, and whose research is also grounded there, I appreciated the opportunity to stretch myself by commenting on Camilla Hawthorne’s wonderful book Contesting Race and Citizenship. I learned a lot about Italy and Black Italian politics, of course, something I will return to below. But given that others are better situated to comment on the regional and topical focus, I want to highlight the ways that the book is relevant far beyond that. It is a model for critical and engaged scholarship in the 21st century.

Hawthorne’s reflections on her position as both an insider and outsider in Italy productively inform her research. She co-theorizes with interlocutors, rather than studying “research subjects” Hawthorne participates in organizing, education, and mutual aid with Black political movements against racial discrimination in Italy, but she also refuses to flatten the messiness of these dynamics. There are no romantic heroes or simple dupes in her account. She dwells on the challenges, contradictions, ambiguities and tensions in Black Italian politics. She reflects on the limits of current movements and highlights that many in these movements do the same. She writes beautifully about how they struggle to forge solidarity under oppressive conditions. This methodological approach enables subtle analysis: she refuses the simplistic framing of citizenship as either solution or problem. Instead, she provides a nuanced portrayal of citizenship as a necessary site of struggle in the current conjuncture.

While Hawthorne highlights challenges and contradictions, she also maintains a sophisticated hopefulness. Situating Black politics in Italy as a part of broader struggles over borders, citizenship, and the dwindling spoils of neoliberal empire in the 21st century, she argues that:

“[w]e are not trapped in an iron cage of exhausted possibilities - indeed, the current liberal impasse has also generated great political effervescence and radical experimentation” (Hawthorne, 2022: 162).

Her insistence on openness is more convincing than a simple appeal to hope, because it is studied and hard-won.  

There is much more that I could say about the book, particularly the political openings it highlights and the questions that it raises. But in the short space remaining I’d like to focus on a theme that is close to my own work: urban-rural relations. In doing so, I want to suggest one of the many ways that Contesting Race and Citizenship stretches far beyond Italy and the Black Mediterranean.

Hawthorne points out that her research was mostly centered in the cities of northern Italy, and in the conclusion she reflects on growing efforts to contest race and citizenship in the more rural Southern regions of Italy. At several points throughout the book, she effectively engages with the work of Antonio Gramsci, who was himself from rural Sardinia in southern Italy. For instance, Hawthorne outlines the specificity of Black Italian life in the southern part of the country. She writes that Black communities there are “‘multiply Southernized,’ and as such they confront multiple overlapping Gramscian Southern Questions”: Italy as periphery of Europe; Southern Italy as peripheral within the nation, and Black Italians as peripheral once more” (Hawthorne, 2022: 186). She continues in the next paragraph:

“The seemingly unique conditions of the South can actually offer powerful lessons for Italy, Europe, and beyond…a reorientation toward Southern Italy, and the Black Mediterranean generally, has the potential to unsettle both hierarchical geographies and teleological narratives of liberalism and modernity” (Hawthorne, 2022: 187).

In a fit of excitement and brainstorming of comparisons between peripheral regions within Italy and the US, I scratched in the margins: Hell Yes!!

In the author-meets-critics session for her book at AAG in the spring of 2023, I met Dr. Hawthorne for the first time. I was a little nervous to comment on a book that is outside of my conventional study area, but was quickly put at ease by her generous reception to my half-baked reflections – she was just as excited as I to think creatively about US/Italian comparisons! My interest in doing so is also informed by Gramsci who, particularly via Stuart Hall, has been important for my own research on the politics of race and class in the US South. In large part they, and others working in subaltern and postcolonial studies, helped me question the Marxian tendency to see the urban proletariat as the subject of history. For Gramsci (1995), this urban bias played into the hands of fascists in early 20th century Italy. With the help of Kelley’s Hammer and Hoe (2015), I started to see that organizing across the urban/rural divide was central to challenging racial capitalism in the US South. After reading Contesting Race and Citizenship, I’m inspired to revisit my own political and intellectual work on urban-rural relations with an eye open for emergent possibilities.

Crucially, Hawthorne’s book helps us see both how racial politics are often different in urban and rural places, and how white supremacy and nationalism structure the relationship between country and city – in Italy and beyond. Thus, it helps us ask anew, in this moment of xenophobic, racist, and nationalist ascendance, what are the possibilities for organizing across urban and rural places?

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References

Gramsci A (1995) The Southern question. West Lafayette, IN: Bordighera.

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

Kelley RDG (2015) Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists during the Great Depression. Twenty-fifth anniversary edition. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press.

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Levi Van Sant is assistant professor of environmental studies at George Mason University in Fairfax, VA. His current research examines the politics of agriculture, land and conservation in the US South.