Camilla Hawthorne

The UC Berkeley Italian Migration Studies Working Group and the Yale Diversity in Italian Studies Working Group are pleased to invite you to a talk by Professor Camilla Hawthorne, taking place on Friday, 23 September at 10am Pacific Time on Zoom (i.e. at 1pm Eastern Time).

Please click here to register for the event.

The book presentation, entitled “Contesting Race and Citizenship: Youth Politics in the Black Mediterranean,” will be followed by a Q&A with participants.

Camilla Hawthorne is Associate Professor of Sociology and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Contesting Race and Citizenship (Cornell University Press, 2022) asks why and how Black Italian activists have taken up national citizenship as a privileged terrain of struggle over race and membership in Italy. What new forms of differentiation and exclusion are emerging in these efforts to reformulate and expand Italian citizenship? Hawthorne’s monograph argues that citizenship – and specifically, longstanding debates about the legal inclusion of Black subjects within European polities – is key to understanding the connection between subtler, late-twentieth century “colorblind” or “cultural racisms” and the increasingly overt racial nationalisms of the last decade. Read more about this project here.

Hawthorne is a critical human geographer and interdisciplinary social scientist, interested in the racial politics of migration and citizenship, inequality, social movements, and Black geographies. Her work engages critical human geography, diaspora, Black European studies, and postcolonial/feminist science and technology studies. She is co-editor of The Black Mediterranean (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), and The Black Geographic (under contract with Duke University Press).

This working group collaboration is generously supported by the UC Berkeley Townsend Center for the Humanities, and the Yale Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration (RITM).

We look forward to seeing as many of you there as possible!

UC Berkeley Italian Migration Studies Working Group

and

Yale Diversity in Italian Studies Working Group