Contesting Race and Citizenship - by Camilla Hawthorne (Paperback)

About the Book

"Drawing on ethnographic and archival research, this book explores the political mobilizations of Black Italians, the children of African and Afro-Latinx immigrants who were born and raised in Italy, as they engage with questions of citizenship, state racism, and global Black diasporic interconnection"--

Book Synopsis

Contesting Race and Citizenship is an original study of Black politics and varieties of political mobilization in Italy. Although there is extensive research on first-generation immigrants and refugees who traveled from Africa to Italy, there is little scholarship about the experiences of Black people who were born and raised in Italy. Camilla Hawthorne focuses on the ways Italians of African descent have become entangled with processes of redefining the legal, racial, cultural, and economic boundaries of Italy and by extension, of Europe itself.

Contesting Race and Citizenship opens discussions of the so-called migrant "crisis" by focusing on a generation of Black people who, although born or raised in Italy, have been thrust into the same racist, xenophobic political climate as the immigrants and refugees who are arriving in Europe from the African continent. Hawthorne traces not only mobilizations for national citizenship but also the more capacious, transnational Black diasporic possibilities that emerge when activists confront the ethical and political limits of citizenship as a means for securing meaningful, lasting racial justice--possibilities that are based on shared critiques of the racial state and shared histories of racial capitalism and colonialism.

Review Quotes

One of the first full-length books meticulously grappling with questions related to Black politics in Italy, Camilla Hawthorne's Contesting Race and Citizenship constitutes not simply another timely contribution to identifying and theorizing «Black Italia», but it also illuminates novel radical possibilities to explore the conceptual boundaries of Blackness in the Italian context.

-- "Altreitalie"

Hawthorne embraces a scholarly commitment to clarity and a citation ethic rooted in careful engagement with works inside and outside the academy.

-- "American Sociological Association"

About the Author

Camilla Hawthorne is Associate Professor of Sociology and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is coeditor of The Black Mediterranean.