At our September 13, 2024 seminar, we will host (via zoom) Professor Camilla Hawthorne (UCSC), for a discussion of her book, Contesting Race and Citizenship: Youth Politics in the Black Mediterranean.

The Fall 2024 Arrighi Center seminar is focused on the theme of “Race, Capitalism and Development” and is 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, postdocs, visiting scholars, as well as friends in Baltimore and around the world.

You can download the full seminar schedule here.

The seminar meets in person in 526 Mergenthaler Hall (JHU Homewood campus) with a zoom option for those outside Baltimore. For more information and/or to request the seminar zoom link, write to seminar assistant Tianao Gui ([email protected]) or [email protected]

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.