Urban Exergue: On Blackness, Spectrality, and the Poetics of Landscape in Contemporary Italy

Abstract

While the Black diasporic experience has long been a focal point of scholarly and popular discourse in North America and most of Europe, Italy has remained overlooked, despite the significant influx of Sub-Saharan African immigrants in recent decades. The emergence of a nascent Black Italian community and the subsequent entrance of Black collective voices onto the stage of Italian society underscore the need for a sustained study of the Afro-Italian lived experiences. In my dissertation, I propose a novel theoretical framework, “urban exergue,” to examine contemporary Black Italian literary and visual productions through the prism of the urban landscape, positing it as the central political-aesthetic dimension for redefining Italy’s postcoloniality and Black existence. In contrast to previous scholarship that focused on representations of the social struggles of belonging, citizenship, or racial discrimination in novels, films, or photographs, my project attempts to elucidate the ways in which places and bodies, and the speculative ideas suggested by Black images navigate shifting realities to embody the very forces of resistance in contemporary Italy. By delving into the distorted and ever-shifting epistemologies of Black urban imaginaries in Italy and investigating how disrupted notions of temporal linearity and spatial fixity are articulated, my dissertation paradoxically affirms the presence of Black communities within Italy’s metropolitan centers and embraces the production of multifaceted and multidirectional assemblages that pave the way for imaginations. Through a critical examination of a diverse spectrum of textual and visual media, my research champions multiple ways of knowing the Black Italian modes of living while shedding light on the ongoing resistance against oppressive racial discourses. Moreover, complicating what Katherine McKittrick calls the “poetics of landscape” that make space for Black geographical expressions, this project sustains that experimental aesthetics in the Black Italian and Mediterranean contexts articulates new spatial-temporal epistemologies alternative to the Black Atlantic and North American conception of race and Blackness.