The Fall 2024 Arrighi Center seminar will focus on the theme of “Race, Capitalism and Development” led by Professors Zophia Edwards and Inés Valdez. The seminar meets weekly on Fridays at 1:30 pm (Baltimore time) and is open to JHU students, faculty, visiting scholars, as well as friends in Baltimore and around the world. The seminar meets in person in 526 Mergenthaler Hall (JHU Homewood campus). You can download the full seminar schedule here. You can also request the full seminar schedule for Fall 2024 and/or a link for Zoom option write to seminar assistant Tianao Gui ([email protected]).

This session is a group discussion focusing on Camilla Hawthorne’s book Contesting Race and Citizenship: Youth Politics in the Black Mediterranean.

Contesting Race and Citizenship: Youth Politics in the Black Mediterranean (Cornell University Press, 2022) attends to the proliferation of Black Italian social movements—projects that address the Italian nation-state and the wider Black diaspora by disrupting the link between whiteness and Italianness and challenging the interlocking racist violences of Fortress Europe. What are the possibilities and limitations of these emergent mobilizations? What new formations are possible, and what older ones are resuscitated in this attempt to challenge the racial borders of Italy and of Europe? To answer these questions, I trace not only mobilizations for national citizenship, but also the more capacious, transnational Black Mediterranean solidarities that emerge when activists confront the ethical and political limits of citizenship as a means for securing meaningful, lasting racial justice—formations that are centered on shared critiques of the racial state, as well as shared histories of racial capitalism and colonialism.