Monday, November 28, 2022 – CANCELED DUE to the STRIKE.
2:00-4:00 PM
Humanities 1, room 210 + Zoom
On November 28th 2022, you are invited to a book launch celebration for Associate Professor of Sociology Camilla Hawthorne’s new book, Contesting Race and Citizenship: Youth Politics in the Black Mediterranean (Cornell University Press, 2022)! Hawthorne will be in conversation with Savannah Shange (Anthropology) and Steve McKay (Sociology).
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. In Contesting Race and Citizenship, I focus 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. This book 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. I trace 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.
The open-access ebook version can be downloaded at: https://d119vjm4apzmdm.
Learn more in the campus news article: New book explores citizenship rights and Black anti-racist politics in Italy
Camilla Hawthorne is Associate Professor of Sociology and Critical Race & Ethnic Studies at UC Santa Cruz. She is a faculty affiliate of the UCSC Science & Justice Research Center and Legal Studies Program. Camilla also serves as program director and faculty member for the Black Europe Summer School in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. She is co-editor of the 2021 volume The Black Mediterranean: Bodies, Borders, and Citizenship (Palgrave Macmillan 2021) and author of Contesting Race and Citizenship: Youth Politics in the Black Mediterranean (Cornell University Press, 2022). In 2020, she was named as one of the national Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera‘s 110 “Women of the Year” for her work on the Black diaspora in Italy, and she was awarded the Leonardo da Vinci Society Humanities Award in 2021.
Co-Sponsored by the Departments of Critical Race and Ethnic Studies, History of Art and Visual Culture, Sociology, and the Science & Justice Research Center.
