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cholars and practitioners of urban planning need to rethink the field’s futures at this important historical juncture: some might call it a moment of truth when there is little left to hide. The COVID-19 pandemic exposed many cracks, contradictions, and inequalities that have always existed but are now more visible. This also includes the global vaccine apartheid that is ongoing as I write these words. Moreover, this is a time when the violence through which U.S. imperialism has exercised power worldwide is increasingly exposed. Protests in the summer of 2020, which spread all over the United States like fire through a long-dried haystack, showed Americans and the whole world that racialized violence and police brutality are real. They also revealed that such brutality is spatially facilitated in American apartheid—a condition that planning has been far from innocent in creating and maintaining. I think this reckoning is particularly important in the United States, the belly of the beast, where there might have been more of an illusion about planning innocence.
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Moreover, this is a time when the violence through which U.S. imperialism has exercised power worldwide is increasingly exposed. Protests in the summer of 2020, which spread all over the United States like fire through a long-dried haystack, showed Americans and the whole world that racialized violence and police brutality are real. They also revealed that such brutality is spatially facilitated in American apartheid—a condition that planning has been far from innocent in creating and maintaining. I think this reckoning is particularly important in the United States, the belly of the beast, where there might have been more of an illusion about planning innocence.
- Moreover, this is a time when the violence through which U.S. imperialism has exercised power worldwide is increasingly exposed.
- Protests in the summer of 2020, which spread all over the United States like fire through a long-dried haystack, showed Americans and the whole world that racialized violence and police brutality are real.
- They also revealed that such brutality is spatially facilitated in American apartheid—a condition that planning has been far from innocent in creating and maintaining.
- I think this reckoning is particularly important in the United States, the belly of the beast, where there might have been more of an illusion about planning innocence.
What’s a Rich Text element?
Moreover, this is a time when the violence through which U.S. imperialism has exercised power worldwide is increasingly exposed. Protests in the summer of 2020, which spread all over the United States like fire through a long-dried haystack, showed Americans and the whole world that racialized violence and police brutality are real. They also revealed that such brutality is spatially facilitated in American apartheid—a condition that planning has been far from innocent in creating and maintaining. I think this reckoning is particularly important in the United States, the belly of the beast, where there might have been more of an illusion about planning innocence.
- Moreover, this is a time when the violence through which U.S. imperialism has exercised power worldwide is increasingly exposed.
- Protests in the summer of 2020, which spread all over the United States like fire through a long-dried haystack, showed Americans and the whole world that racialized violence and police brutality are real.
- They also revealed that such brutality is spatially facilitated in American apartheid—a condition that planning has been far from innocent in creating and maintaining. I think this reckoning is particularly important in the United States, the belly of the beast, where there might have been more of an illusion about planning innocence.
What’s a Rich Text element?
Moreover, this is a time when the violence through which U.S. imperialism has exercised power worldwide is increasingly exposed. Protests in the summer of 2020, which spread all over the United States like fire through a long-dried haystack, showed Americans and the whole world that racialized violence and police brutality are real. They also revealed that such brutality is spatially facilitated in American apartheid—a condition that planning has been far from innocent in creating and maintaining. I think this reckoning is particularly important in the United States, the belly of the beast, where there might have been more of an illusion about planning innocence.
What’s a Rich Text element?
Moreover, this is a time when the violence through which U.S. imperialism has exercised power worldwide is increasingly exposed. Protests in the summer of 2020, which spread all over the United States like fire through a long-dried haystack, showed Americans and the whole world that racialized violence and police brutality are real. They also revealed that such brutality is spatially facilitated in American apartheid—a condition that planning has been far from innocent in creating and maintaining. I think this reckoning is particularly important in the United States, the belly of the beast, where there might have been more of an illusion about planning innocence.
What’s a Rich Text element?
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Camilla Hawthorne’s Contesting Race and Citizenship: Youth Politics in the Black Mediterranean is generous and generative. In the book, Hawthorne offers us a richly researched and profoundly engaged analysis of what she describes as the mutually constitutive relationship between race and citizenship. Put differently, the book elucidates the politics of Black belonging beyond borders. Placing the Black Mediterranean front and center, she focuses on Italy as the empirical site of engaged discourses and activism around the fraught and messy nature of national belonging - particularly for Black Italians and African-descended people living in Italy. Through the multi-sited, multi-regional investigation of the Italian nation-state, she guides us through understanding the ways in which citizenship functions as a process or vehicle of mobilizing power. Research reveals how and why power is interrogated, and becomes troubled by and through the diasporic politics of Black activists on the ground. With interventions across multiple disciplines - including Black studies, sociology, critical citizenship studies, and geography - Hawthorne frames Black Mediterranean Geographies, engaging its historical and geographical specificity to connect Black lives to the boundaries of Italianness. To do this tracing, Contesting Race and Citizenship centers on the voices and experiences of Black immigrants, refugees, and second-generation Italians, describing them as “profound theorists of their own condition” (19).
Camilla Hawthorne’s methodological approach is multifaceted, conjoining data curated over a decade from social media, art, and culture alongside deep ethnographic work and archival research, calling to mind Katherine McKittrick’s provocation: “Black method is precise, detailed, coded, long, and forever” (2021: 5). Hawthorne’s methodological openness is consistently guided and grounded by Black Italian activists. At the end of the book, Hawthorne generously shares a methodological appendix, with a description of and reflection on her research process, engaging in collective work and communal knowledge production inherent in grassroots education practices. Furthering the spirit of community-centered, solidarity-based politics, Contesting Race and Citizenship is open-access, allowing for broader accessibility and readership. Hawthorne has shared and discussed the book in Italian media, reaching directly back to and in support of the individuals and communities with whom she collaborated over the years. The politics of care in both theory and practice enacted by Hawthorne is laudable and an exemplar for those of us navigating our own commitments as scholar-activists.
This forum follows an Author Meets Readers Session at the 2023 AAG Annual Meeting in Denver, Colorado, USA. An engaged group of readers, which included Ilari Giglioli, Akira Drake Rodriguez, Diane Enobabor, and Levi Van Sant, shared stories, provocations, and affective experiences in (well-deserved) celebration of, and for both, Camilla and her interlocutors in Italy. Their commentaries are shared here for all of us to engage with and celebrate further.
References
McKittrick K (2021) Dear Science and Other Stories. Durham: Duke University Press.
LaToya Eaves is a Southern Black queer femme from North Carolina. She is an associate professor of geography at the University of Tennessee and researches Black feminist and queer placemaking in the U.S. South.
