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  • Poetry
    A medley of artwork from Le braccianti di Euripide collective

    The dolls have pronounced it – Poems by Mohamed Kheder

    Ukrainian Poetry in La Macchina Sognante – In Solidarity with the People of Ukraine

    Ukrainian Poetry in La Macchina Sognante – In Solidarity with the People of Ukraine

    Hunting for images in Guatemala City: Alvaro Sánchez interviewed by Pina Piccolo

    Three Poems from “The Bastard and the Bishop” – Gerald Fleming

    Hunting for images in Guatemala City: Alvaro Sánchez interviewed by Pina Piccolo

    God appeared at midnight: Three poems by Bitasta Ghoshal

    Hunting for images in Guatemala City: Alvaro Sánchez interviewed by Pina Piccolo

    I dream of the tree of silence: Poems by Rafael Romero

    Always another curtain  to draw open: Five poems by Helen Wickes

    Always another curtain to draw open: Five poems by Helen Wickes

  • Fiction
    FLORAL PRINT FLAT SHOES – Lucia Cupertino

    FLORAL PRINT FLAT SHOES – Lucia Cupertino

    Hunting for images in Guatemala City: Alvaro Sánchez interviewed by Pina Piccolo

    The Red Bananas – N. Annadurai

    Hunting for images in Guatemala City: Alvaro Sánchez interviewed by Pina Piccolo

    THE CULPRIT – Gourahari Das

    Hunting for images in Guatemala City: Alvaro Sánchez interviewed by Pina Piccolo

    A very different story (Part I) – Nandini Sahu

    Hunting for images in Guatemala City: Alvaro Sánchez interviewed by Pina Piccolo

    After Breaking News – Mojaffor Hossain

    Hunting for images in Guatemala City: Alvaro Sánchez interviewed by Pina Piccolo

    THE THEATER OF MEMORY – Julio Monteiro Martins

    Let the Rivers Speak! – Lucia Cupertino and the Poetry of the Global Souths, by  Pina Piccolo

    Fanta Blackcurrant – Makena Onjerika

    Photographer Sumana Mitra on her street photography and recent explorations of Surrealist techniques

    All the Sadeqs are getting killed – Mojaffor Hossain, translated by Noora Shamsi Bahar

    Photographer Sumana Mitra on her street photography and recent explorations of Surrealist techniques

    Here, Where We Keep on Meeting – Giuseppe Ferrara

  • Non Fiction
    Figures of Pathos  (Part I)- Salvatore Piermarini

    Figures of Pathos (Part I)- Salvatore Piermarini

    Plowing the publishing world  – Tribute to Brazilian writer Itamar Vieira, by Loretta Emiri

    Plowing the publishing world – Tribute to Brazilian writer Itamar Vieira, by Loretta Emiri

    Jaider Esbell – Specialist in Provocations, by Loretta Emiri

    Jaider Esbell – Specialist in Provocations, by Loretta Emiri

    Farewell, Silver Girl – Carolyn Miller

    Farewell, Silver Girl – Carolyn Miller

    Lino-printing fairy tales over Constitutions- The artwork of Mihaela Šuman

    Layers of overlap: theatre, cinema, memory, imagination – Farah Ahamed

    Architectures of Delusion –  Steve Salaita

    Architectures of Delusion – Steve Salaita

  • Interviews & reviews
    The Power of the Female Gaze: On Maria Antonietta Scarpari’s Artistic Practice – Camilla Boemio

    The Power of the Female Gaze: On Maria Antonietta Scarpari’s Artistic Practice – Camilla Boemio

    A new reality needed –  A conversation with Mathew Emmett, by Camilla Boemio

    A new reality needed – A conversation with Mathew Emmett, by Camilla Boemio

    Farewell, Silver Girl – Carolyn Miller

    A medley of artwork from Le braccianti di Euripide collective

    Sagar Kumar Sharma in Conversation with Santosh Bakaya

    Sagar Kumar Sharma in Conversation with Santosh Bakaya

    Sagar Kumar Sharma in a Literary Conversation with Sarita Jenamani

    Sagar Kumar Sharma in a Literary Conversation with Sarita Jenamani

    That’s how war left me alive – Wesam Almadani interviewed by Le Ortique

    That’s how war left me alive – Wesam Almadani interviewed by Le Ortique

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    • Interviews and reviews
    • Non fiction
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    M’aidez, May Day – Pina Piccolo

    M’aidez, May Day – Pina Piccolo

    Desperately seeking Marion: A Review of ” Women, Antifascism and Mussolini’s Italy – The Life of Marion Cave Rosselli”, by Isabelle Richet

    Desperately seeking Marion: A Review of ” Women, Antifascism and Mussolini’s Italy – The Life of Marion Cave Rosselli”, by Isabelle Richet

    Hunting for images in Guatemala City: Alvaro Sánchez interviewed by Pina Piccolo

    Tim Ingold’s “Correspondences” – Giuseppe Ferrara

    Hunting for images in Guatemala City: Alvaro Sánchez interviewed by Pina Piccolo

    But for plants there is no delegating: Seven Poems by Achille Pignatelli

    Hunting for images in Guatemala City: Alvaro Sánchez interviewed by Pina Piccolo

    Hunting for images in Guatemala City: Alvaro Sánchez interviewed by Pina Piccolo

    Skjelv Du På Handa, Vladimir? / Does Your Hand Shake, Vladimir? –  Transnational Solidarity Project (Odveig Klyve)

    Skjelv Du På Handa, Vladimir? / Does Your Hand Shake, Vladimir? – Transnational Solidarity Project (Odveig Klyve)

    Hunting for images in Guatemala City: Alvaro Sánchez interviewed by Pina Piccolo

    The malice of desires feeds the power of my imagination – Poems by Mubeen Kishany

    Alahor in Granata: A Forgotten Opera by Donizetti – Fawzi Karim

    Alahor in Granata: A Forgotten Opera by Donizetti – Fawzi Karim

    EARTH ANTHEM : A eulogy of the Earth, its beauty, its biodiversity – Abhay K.

    EARTH ANTHEM : A eulogy of the Earth, its beauty, its biodiversity – Abhay K.

  • News
    RUCKSACK – GLOBAL POETRY PATCHWORK PROJECT

    RUCKSACK – GLOBAL POETRY PATCHWORK PROJECT

    REFUGEE TALES July 3-5:  Register for a Walk In Solidarity with Refugees, Asylum Seekers and Detainees

    REFUGEE TALES July 3-5: Register for a Walk In Solidarity with Refugees, Asylum Seekers and Detainees

    IL BIANCO E IL NERO – LE PAROLE PER DIRLO, Conference Milan Sept. 7

    IL BIANCO E IL NERO – LE PAROLE PER DIRLO, Conference Milan Sept. 7

    OPEN POEM TO THE CURATORS OF THE 58th VENICE BIENNALE  FROM THE GHOSTS OF THAT RELIC YOU SHOULD NOT DARE CALL “OUR BOAT” (Pina Piccolo)

    OPEN POEM TO THE CURATORS OF THE 58th VENICE BIENNALE FROM THE GHOSTS OF THAT RELIC YOU SHOULD NOT DARE CALL “OUR BOAT” (Pina Piccolo)

    OPEN LETTER BY A GROUP OF BLACK ITALIAN WOMEN

    OPEN LETTER BY A GROUP OF BLACK ITALIAN WOMEN

    Crowdfunding for [DI]SCORDARE project

    Crowdfunding for [DI]SCORDARE project

  • Home
  • Poetry
    A medley of artwork from Le braccianti di Euripide collective

    The dolls have pronounced it – Poems by Mohamed Kheder

    Ukrainian Poetry in La Macchina Sognante – In Solidarity with the People of Ukraine

    Ukrainian Poetry in La Macchina Sognante – In Solidarity with the People of Ukraine

    Hunting for images in Guatemala City: Alvaro Sánchez interviewed by Pina Piccolo

    Three Poems from “The Bastard and the Bishop” – Gerald Fleming

    Hunting for images in Guatemala City: Alvaro Sánchez interviewed by Pina Piccolo

    God appeared at midnight: Three poems by Bitasta Ghoshal

    Hunting for images in Guatemala City: Alvaro Sánchez interviewed by Pina Piccolo

    I dream of the tree of silence: Poems by Rafael Romero

    Always another curtain  to draw open: Five poems by Helen Wickes

    Always another curtain to draw open: Five poems by Helen Wickes

  • Fiction
    FLORAL PRINT FLAT SHOES – Lucia Cupertino

    FLORAL PRINT FLAT SHOES – Lucia Cupertino

    Hunting for images in Guatemala City: Alvaro Sánchez interviewed by Pina Piccolo

    The Red Bananas – N. Annadurai

    Hunting for images in Guatemala City: Alvaro Sánchez interviewed by Pina Piccolo

    THE CULPRIT – Gourahari Das

    Hunting for images in Guatemala City: Alvaro Sánchez interviewed by Pina Piccolo

    A very different story (Part I) – Nandini Sahu

    Hunting for images in Guatemala City: Alvaro Sánchez interviewed by Pina Piccolo

    After Breaking News – Mojaffor Hossain

    Hunting for images in Guatemala City: Alvaro Sánchez interviewed by Pina Piccolo

    THE THEATER OF MEMORY – Julio Monteiro Martins

    Let the Rivers Speak! – Lucia Cupertino and the Poetry of the Global Souths, by  Pina Piccolo

    Fanta Blackcurrant – Makena Onjerika

    Photographer Sumana Mitra on her street photography and recent explorations of Surrealist techniques

    All the Sadeqs are getting killed – Mojaffor Hossain, translated by Noora Shamsi Bahar

    Photographer Sumana Mitra on her street photography and recent explorations of Surrealist techniques

    Here, Where We Keep on Meeting – Giuseppe Ferrara

  • Non Fiction
    Figures of Pathos  (Part I)- Salvatore Piermarini

    Figures of Pathos (Part I)- Salvatore Piermarini

    Plowing the publishing world  – Tribute to Brazilian writer Itamar Vieira, by Loretta Emiri

    Plowing the publishing world – Tribute to Brazilian writer Itamar Vieira, by Loretta Emiri

    Jaider Esbell – Specialist in Provocations, by Loretta Emiri

    Jaider Esbell – Specialist in Provocations, by Loretta Emiri

    Farewell, Silver Girl – Carolyn Miller

    Farewell, Silver Girl – Carolyn Miller

    Lino-printing fairy tales over Constitutions- The artwork of Mihaela Šuman

    Layers of overlap: theatre, cinema, memory, imagination – Farah Ahamed

    Architectures of Delusion –  Steve Salaita

    Architectures of Delusion – Steve Salaita

  • Interviews & reviews
    The Power of the Female Gaze: On Maria Antonietta Scarpari’s Artistic Practice – Camilla Boemio

    The Power of the Female Gaze: On Maria Antonietta Scarpari’s Artistic Practice – Camilla Boemio

    A new reality needed –  A conversation with Mathew Emmett, by Camilla Boemio

    A new reality needed – A conversation with Mathew Emmett, by Camilla Boemio

    Farewell, Silver Girl – Carolyn Miller

    A medley of artwork from Le braccianti di Euripide collective

    Sagar Kumar Sharma in Conversation with Santosh Bakaya

    Sagar Kumar Sharma in Conversation with Santosh Bakaya

    Sagar Kumar Sharma in a Literary Conversation with Sarita Jenamani

    Sagar Kumar Sharma in a Literary Conversation with Sarita Jenamani

    That’s how war left me alive – Wesam Almadani interviewed by Le Ortique

    That’s how war left me alive – Wesam Almadani interviewed by Le Ortique

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    • Interviews and reviews
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    M’aidez, May Day – Pina Piccolo

    M’aidez, May Day – Pina Piccolo

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    Desperately seeking Marion: A Review of ” Women, Antifascism and Mussolini’s Italy – The Life of Marion Cave Rosselli”, by Isabelle Richet

    Hunting for images in Guatemala City: Alvaro Sánchez interviewed by Pina Piccolo

    Tim Ingold’s “Correspondences” – Giuseppe Ferrara

    Hunting for images in Guatemala City: Alvaro Sánchez interviewed by Pina Piccolo

    But for plants there is no delegating: Seven Poems by Achille Pignatelli

    Hunting for images in Guatemala City: Alvaro Sánchez interviewed by Pina Piccolo

    Hunting for images in Guatemala City: Alvaro Sánchez interviewed by Pina Piccolo

    Skjelv Du På Handa, Vladimir? / Does Your Hand Shake, Vladimir? –  Transnational Solidarity Project (Odveig Klyve)

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    Hunting for images in Guatemala City: Alvaro Sánchez interviewed by Pina Piccolo

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    Alahor in Granata: A Forgotten Opera by Donizetti – Fawzi Karim

    Alahor in Granata: A Forgotten Opera by Donizetti – Fawzi Karim

    EARTH ANTHEM : A eulogy of the Earth, its beauty, its biodiversity – Abhay K.

    EARTH ANTHEM : A eulogy of the Earth, its beauty, its biodiversity – Abhay K.

  • News
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    RUCKSACK – GLOBAL POETRY PATCHWORK PROJECT

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    IL BIANCO E IL NERO – LE PAROLE PER DIRLO, Conference Milan Sept. 7

    IL BIANCO E IL NERO – LE PAROLE PER DIRLO, Conference Milan Sept. 7

    OPEN POEM TO THE CURATORS OF THE 58th VENICE BIENNALE  FROM THE GHOSTS OF THAT RELIC YOU SHOULD NOT DARE CALL “OUR BOAT” (Pina Piccolo)

    OPEN POEM TO THE CURATORS OF THE 58th VENICE BIENNALE FROM THE GHOSTS OF THAT RELIC YOU SHOULD NOT DARE CALL “OUR BOAT” (Pina Piccolo)

    OPEN LETTER BY A GROUP OF BLACK ITALIAN WOMEN

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    Crowdfunding for [DI]SCORDARE project

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Home Non Fiction

Anti-racism without race: a pernicious, ongoing problem in the Italian movement against racism – Camilla Hawthorne and Pina Piccolo

December 2, 2018
in Non Fiction, The dreaming machine n 3
“Flow back into the veins, History” three poems by Lucia Cupertino
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By the end of 2016, we have witnessed a resurgence of both verbal and deadly physical aggressions against Black people, both in Italy and in the United States—from the murder of Nigerian asylum-seeker Emmanuel Chidi Namdi in Fermo, Italy to the shootings of Alton Sterling, Philando Castle, and Korryn Gaines by police in the United States. Against this deadly global backdrop, we believe that it crucially important to develop a complex analysis of anti-Blackness in Italy, both to understand its scope and to develop adequate means for combating it.

 

On July 5, 2016, 36-year old Nigerian asylum seeker Emmanuel Chidi Nnamdi was beaten to death by Amedeo Mancini, a white Italian well known soccer ultra who was also associated with the local chapter of the neofascist CasaPound political movement. Emmanuel and his wife Chimiary had fled the violence of Boko Haram (they lost their parents and a daughter in a bombing); they undertook a harrowing journey through Libya and across the Mediterranean, finally arriving in Palermo. They had been hosted by the bishop’s seminary of Fermo since last September. On the afternoon of July 5, Emmanuel and Chimiary were walking down a street when two men began to shout insults at them, at one point calling his wife a scimmia africana (“African monkey”). When Emmanuel reacted in an attempt to defend his wife from this abuse, Mancini proceeded to attack him with a street sign ripped out of the ground. He fell into a coma, and died the following day. Chimiary generously offered to donate her husband’s organs for transplant, in a gesture showing a great sense of humanity and ability to go beyond a more than justified resentment for what had befallen her husband

 

In this article, we would like to signal some dangerous tendencies and confusions that plague mainstream antiracism in Italy while tying them to the their specific historical development in Italy. In the wake of Emmanuel Chidi Nnamdi’s murder, many commentators have been focused on uncovering the underlying feelings and sentiments that motivated the murderer. This approach is compatible with a broader trend in post-World War II European antiracist movements: because “race” does not exist at the biological level, and is, thus, unscientific, it is best to avoid its harmful effects by looking for the cause of violence elsewhere, namely in the realm of sentiments such as fear (e.g., the fear of diversity). Alternative terms like “diversophobia,” the argument goes, allow us to avoid the dangerous category of race (implied by the use of the very word racism), and they are more accurate because scientifically speaking, “race” does not exist. In the quest to do away with the term “race” many in the antiracism movement in Italy have preferred to use terms such as “xenophobia” focusing on fear of “foreigners”, or have sought solace in the concepts of “difference” and “alterity”, disregarding that both posit a normative state of being against which the “other” or the “different” stand out. This has then led to casting “antiracism as a “solidarity movement” a term that provides comfort both to the Catholic currents and the Marxist currents that make up progressive organizations in Italy. However, what are the consequences of this “comfort” on the likelihood of the rise of an antiracist movement that has the targets of racism as protagonists, or the development of discourses that that are sufficiently complex to differentiate between “hate crimes” based on race or nationality?

 

In “ ‘Razza’ e ‘umano’ non sono termini banali “, the paper we wrote as a response to a piece issuing the call “Do not kill the sense of the human (Non uccidete l’umano)”, which appeared in the online magazine Frontiere News we sought to counter this plea for the use of the word “diversofobia” by focusing on relations of power; the non-static nature of the concept of race; systemic and institutional racisms; the historical narratives that have shaped the category of the “human”; and the way that avoiding the term “race” at all costs only delegitimizes the experiences of people who endure racism. We believe that clarity on these issues is of the utmost importance in a country that still refuses to reckon with (or perhaps, as Italian historian Alessandro Triulzi writes, selectively and nostalgically reconfigures) its own colonial past. As Anna Curcio and Miguel Mellino write in Darkmatter,

 

This foreclusion of race in the current Italian public sphere – intricately tied up with the historical Italian post-fascist inability to mourn…is nothing but the necessary supplement to the increasing racialization of the Italian formation […] The more evident the racial material constitution of Italian society becomes the more violent will be its discursive foreclosure, both within and outside the institutional domain.

 

In a country that (unlike many other places) lacks a fully developed movement against racism led by people of color, anti-racist mobilizations remain primarily in the hands of white Italian “allies” and, at least in the past, were subject to the powerful influence of political parties and labor unions. In addition, the last decades have seen a conflation of questions of racism with migration. While a growing number of scholars working in Italy are now engaging with the concept of razza via race-critical and whiteness studies (see, for instance, the InteRGRace research collective and the edited collection Il colore della nazione), this crucial work is only just beginning to be put in conversation with both mainstream antiracism and emerging forms of autonomous Black organizing in Italy.

 

The fundamental problem is that in attempting to achieve colorblindness, mainstream antiracist activists in Italy neglect the basic existence of white privilege. An example of this can be seen in the case of former Minister of Integration Cecile Kyenge, the Italy’s first Black government minister. In 2013, right-wing Lega Nord minister Roberto Caderoli infamously called Minister Kyenge an “orangutan.” However, Calderoli was semi-absolved in 2015 when a Senate vote (which included left, right, and centrist parties) decided that he could be charged with defamation, but not with racial discrimination.

 

Returning to Emmanuel Chidi Nnamdi’s story, how can we ignore the fact that the epithet directed against his wife (“African monkey”) stemmed not from a “fear of difference,” but rather from a colonial past that long predates both the mass media and the fears set loose by the economic crisis? The roots of this insult and the horrific physical violence that followed in Italy’s colonial history is clear, and we ignore these connections only at our own peril.

 

On race and “mental laziness”

In the article issuing the call “to save the sense of the human” the author argues that it is lazy to describe the motivation behind the murder of Emmanuel Chidi Namdi as merely “racism,” suggesting that “xenophobia” or perhaps even “diversophobia” are more appropriate terms. Yet, the problem lies not with the term “racism”; rather, we need to broaden our working definition of racism based on the history of racism’s own nefarious mechanics. The concept of “race” emerged in relation to the consolidation of “Europe” or “the West” at the end of the fifteenth century, a violent world-making project forged through colonialism, imperialism, and enslavement.

 

While biological understandings of “race” arguably reached their peak during the 20th century fascist regimes (though, as scholars such as Troy Duster have warned, modern genetic technologies are now attempting to re-inscribe biological race via DNA and the genome), race has always been a polyvalent category that could never be reduced to just blood or skin color. “Race” is a tool, one that has been used to essentialize and calcify difference, and thus arrange groups in a hierarchical classification. It is as a power-laden, “floating” signifier that is made meaningful through religion, culture, geography, mobility, bodily practice, and social associations for the purpose of producing what geographer Ruth Wilson Gilmore calls “premature death.”

 

This does not mean that we are using race “lazily” as shorthand for other forms of oppression and violence. One has only to look back to the Enlightenment philosophers that consolidated theories of racial difference in the eighteenth century, from Kant to Voltaire: these thinkers frequently intertwined the cultural and the biological (what Stuart Hall called “racism’s two registers), along with the environmental and the national. Thus, the modern nation-state itself can be understood as a fundamentally racial project, built on the idea of the nation as a “racial family” whose borders protect the national body from pollution.

 

Even the project of Italian national unification involved serious contestations over the racial character of the nascent Italian nation, and birthed its own homegrown school of Italian racial theorists, including Cesare Lombroso (commonly referred to as the father of modern criminology) and statistician, sociologist, and criminologist Alfredo Niceforo. Indeed, at the end of the nineteenth century, Italy was beginning to define itself in racial terms in relation to both its internal North/South divide (deconstructed so eloquently by Antonio Gramsci) and its growing overseas empire in the horn of Africa.

 

Yet the scope of Italian colonialism has been denied, both in terms of the colonial past and in terms of its continued influence on the postcolonial present. While other countries take down statues of Rhodes or remove busts of enslavers, in Affile, Italy, the authorities have allowed the construction of a mausoleum dedicated to General Rodolfo Graziani, known as “the butcher of Fezzan”, who in a thirty year span of colonial wars in Libya and the Horn of Africa engaged in the heinous crimes of using mustard gas on the Ethiopian population and bombing Red Cross hospitals and was, thus, listed by the United Nations as a criminal of war. In recent years, it has been dispiriting to note that during presentations of novels written by the grandchildren of the diasporas due to the Italian colonial wars, such as “Timira” (by Antar Marincola and Wuming2)   or “Il comandante del fiume (by Ubah Cristina Ali Farah) or “Adua (by Igiaba Scego) even Italian university students, know nothing or very little about the chapter on “Italian colonialism” is either completely ignored or very poorly taught. This does not bode well, even if these same people have well-intentioned, even antiracist aspirations.

 

“Racial evaporations” and the post-World War II antiracist lexicon

After World War II, “race” was disavowed in mainstream European anti-racism. Thanks in large part to the influence of liberal American anthropologists such as Franz Boas, Ruth Benedict, and Ashley Montagu, race—with its unsavory ties to fascist eugenics and racial laws—was seen as inextricably, historically associated with hierarchies of superiority and inferiority. Manifestos such as the postwar UNESCO Statement on Race (or its Italian counterpart, the 2008 Manifesto degli scienziati antirazzisti) thus suggested that “race” had too many negative connotations, and that the term should be avoided in favor of more neutral categories such as “ethnicity” or “culture.” This “racial evaporation,” as David Theo Goldberg describes it (and as elaborated further in the Italian case by Gaia Giuliani and Cristina Lombardi-Diop), however, functions by conveniently relegating the idea of “race” to the past in an attempt to metaphorically seal the books on fascism and colonialism.

 

But of course, the past is never dead. “Antiracism without race,” scholars such as Dace Dzenovska and Alana Lentin have argued, makes the goal of antiracism projects the elimination of the term “race,” rather than the destruction the historically-sedimented structure of power underlying the creation of racial categories through which groups are differentially subjected. The article we quoted in the beginning of this paper , which appeared in Italian web magazine Frontiere News is an example of the former approach: “Using the term ‘racism,’ even to condemn it,” the author argues, “means continuing to propagate an erroneous concept founded on the existence of different human ‘races.’”

 

As feminist anthropologist Kamala Viswewaran writes, this sort of liberal antiracism is sorely limited because it neglects the crucial fact that racism is what produces the social reality of race. “Race” does not exist without racism; our goal as antiracists should therefore be to oppose the structures that uphold racism and in turn legitimate “race” as a measure of expendability. Emmanuel Chidi Namdi was murdered by a racist system that legitimates the vile actions of individual fascists. He was a casualty not of an individual pathology, of one person’s aberrant diversophobia, or of the word “race,” but rather of a racist global system that relies on the social construction of race to render Black lives killable.

 

Banishing the word “race” does not make racism go away. It only weakens antiracist activism by denying the legitimacy of Black people’s lived experiences of racism. And turning to alternative categories such as “ethnicity” or “culture” only causes those terms to harden as they come to effectively fill the echoing void leftover by “race.” This specific problem can be found in the terms used within self-proclaimed antiracist spaces in Italy, as they seek to simultaneously avoid the concept of “race” and also build solidarity among people of different racial backgrounds. A common refrain among Italian progressive working on “intercultural” projects is that because of the failures of the “multicultural model” of the US, the “integrationist model” of France, and the “communities” model” of the UK Italy must strike on its own to elaborate an effective answer that takes into account the shortcomings of those experiences. It is indeed quite common to hear activists talk about “interculturality” (intercultura) or “hybridity” (meticciato) and sing the praises of their effectiveness (sometimes Brazil is pointed to as a successful example of “meticciato” and only in recent years has there been a more in depth discussion of the real conditions of blacks and indigenous people in that country). However, because methodological contestations of these categories would require detailed discussions of the historical processes that have led to the realities of those countries rather than to “models”, we think they merit their own, separate critique, that we reserve to address in a separate paper.

 

Are we really all in the same boat?

The Jamaican philosopher Sylvia Wynter has challenged the claim of universalism rooted in Western Enlightenment philosophy, arguing that the category of the “human” has never actually been universal. This is the fundamental problem with the appeals to “humanity” that have accompanied the current refugee rights movement in Europe. The “human” has been used as a dividing line or hierarchy to determine who is a rights-bearing, free, and agentic subject and who is not. It is a product of what the great postcolonial intellectual and poet of Negritude Aimé Césaire decried as Europe’s “pseudo-humanism,” whose “concept of those rights has been – and still is – narrow and fragmentary, incomplete and biased and, all things considered, sordidly racist.”

 

For that reason, one simply cannot start from the perspective that “we are all human” if some groups have never been recognized as fully human in the first place. This is why Amedeo Mancini felt justified in calling Emmanuel Chidi Namdi’s wife Chimiary an “African monkey” before he beat Emmanuel to death on the street in Fermo. At a recent anti-racism assembly in Rome convened after the murder, I witnessed a man carrying a handwritten placard that read, “We are all evolved monkeys” (essentially, the Italian equivalent of saying #AllLivesMatter). But this sort of thinking denies the deeply entrenched existence of race-based privilege. Tragically, we are not all in the same boat—some of our boats are leaking, while others of us are cruising leisurely on mega yachts.

An earlier version of this essay titled” ‘Razza’ e ‘umano’ non sono termini banali” was published in Italian for the web magazine Frontiere News on July 26, 2016. The authors would like to thank Gabriele Proglio, Tatiana Petrovich Njegosh, and many others for their insightful comments on that earlier piece. A shorter version of this paper title “Anti-racism without race” appeared on September 15, 2016 in the online journal Africa is a country

 

See author website here.

 

See author’s blog, here.

 

Cover image: Collage by Basseck Mankabu.

Tags: anti-racism movementcolor-blindnessEurocentrismEuropean historyfascismhistoryItalyNaziismracestructural racismwhite privilegewhiteness

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November 30, 2021
Photographer Sumana Mitra on her street photography and recent explorations of Surrealist techniques
Fiction

Here, Where We Keep on Meeting – Giuseppe Ferrara

November 29, 2021
Lino-printing fairy tales over Constitutions- The artwork of Mihaela Šuman
Out of bounds

Like a Shell Embedded in Stone – Five Poems by Mihaela Šuman

November 26, 2021
Photographer Sumana Mitra on her street photography and recent explorations of Surrealist techniques
Out of bounds

Excerpts from “Don’t Say My Son Is Walking in Heaven” – Islam Nawwar, trans. Phoebe Bay Carter

November 25, 2021
Next Post
Somewhere deep inside my soul,  a tiny bone shattered – Five poems from “The Bitter Herb”, by Raphael D’Abdon

Solidarity with the Poet in Prison: Poets Read Ashraf Fayadh Poems in Five Languages - Presented by Sana Darghmouni

The Dreaming Machine

Writing and visual arts from the world.

Interviews and reviews

“Future” -a window into the diversity of Black Italian women’s experiences, review by Candice Whitney

In 1975, Toni Morrison gave a speech at the University of Portland where she argued that artists and scholars have ...

November 30, 2019
Intersections

silviotrump – Serena Piccoli

silviotrump (#toadeena)   Europe |cradle of civilization| could not but teach you how to. Plato, Aristotle, Sappho, Dante and Silvio ...

November 30, 2017
Fiction

LIFE IS NOT DECIDED – Blessing Dafieldhare and Nsiimire Angella, from Short Time in Short Stories

LIFE IS NOT DECIDED   The neighbour’s cock crowed to announce another new day. A day of business and no ...

May 1, 2019
Poetry

THE NIGHT OF GOGH – Moulinath Goswami

  THE NIGHT OF GOGH Many years, after many many years... When, on canvas, myriad colours and water had breathed impressions ...

November 21, 2020
Interviews and reviews

A medley of artwork from Le braccianti di Euripide collective

  Le braccianti di euripide is an art collective, whose production broadly covers the range of a variety of art ...

April 29, 2022

Latest

The Power of the Female Gaze: On Maria Antonietta Scarpari’s Artistic Practice – Camilla Boemio

The Power of the Female Gaze: On Maria Antonietta Scarpari’s Artistic Practice – Camilla Boemio

May 4, 2022
M’aidez, May Day – Pina Piccolo

M’aidez, May Day – Pina Piccolo

May 1, 2022
A medley of artwork from Le braccianti di Euripide collective

The dolls have pronounced it – Poems by Mohamed Kheder

April 30, 2022
A new reality needed –  A conversation with Mathew Emmett, by Camilla Boemio

A new reality needed – A conversation with Mathew Emmett, by Camilla Boemio

April 30, 2022

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RUCKSACK – GLOBAL POETRY PATCHWORK PROJECT
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RUCKSACK – GLOBAL POETRY PATCHWORK PROJECT

by Dreaming Machine
2 years ago
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3 SEPTEMBER 2020 – DEADLINE FOR RUCKSACK – GLOBAL POETRY PATCHWORK PROJECT   Rucksack, at Global Poetry Patchwork is an...

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