Our current moment is characterized by the largest global mass migrations of people in recent history and the resurgence of explicitly racist, xenophobic nationalisms. In Italy, post-2008 economic stagnation and the southern European refugee emergency have laid bare the endurance of ethno-nationalism and the production of new racial essentialisms in a supposedly “post-racial” state. Italy is home to almost 1 million children of immigrants who were born in Italy but lack legal citizenship, as well as hundreds of thousands of refugees who endure state-sanctioned and extrajudicial forms of everyday violence. Black youth born and raised in Italy, whose struggles to be recognized as Italian are met with endless legal and de facto obstacles, are at the forefront of a new wave of activism against racialized citizenship, the violence of Fortress Europe, and the unspoken whiteness of Italian identity. Their efforts have crystallized around a movement to reform Italian citizenship law toward jus soli, or right of birthplace citizenship. But these activists are increasingly faced with the impossibility of de-racializing the Italian nation, as new racisms are reproduced within the presumably colorblind category of “citizen.” I argue that the fraught task of disentangling race from nation has generated new forms of anti-Blackness and racial differentiation that do not adhere to a neat inclusion/exclusion binary, and has also inspired Black Mediterranean diasporic political formations that look beyond the nation-state.

This project is based on sixteen months of multi-sited fieldwork conducted over five years with Black activists across northern and central Italy, and employs multiple research methods: interviews, policy analysis, participant observation, virtual ethnography, and archival research. My work draws on Black diaspora studies, postcolonial theory, and critical human geography, and represents the first in-depth study of Black youth political mobilizations in Italy. While there exists extensive research on first-generation immigrants and refugees who traveled from Africa to Italy, there is a lacuna in the literature with regard to the experiences of Black youth who were born and raised in Italy. But rather than asking whether Italians of African descent have “integrated” into a supposedly bounded and homogenous Italian nation, I focus on the ways they have become deeply entangled with the ambiguous process of re-defining the legal, racial, cultural, and economic boundaries of Italy.

While some scholars have argued that European nation-states entirely preclude the incorporation of Black subjects, I instead show that the boundaries of Italianness are currently being reworked in relation to attributes such as cosmopolitan hybridity, economic productivity, and local cultural fluency. In particular, the historic precariousness of Italian “whiteness” in relation to northern Europe has created a unique opening for Black activists to expand the definition of Italianness via older ideas of Italo-Mediterranean mixedness. Yet these renegotiations have also generated deeply racialized distinctions between “assimilable” Black citizens-in-waiting and “non-assimilable” Black refugees. The precarious inclusion of Italian-born Black youth has thus become predicated on the extent to which they can be differentiated from Black refugees based on their capacity to “revitalize” the Italian nation.

Scholars of the Black diaspora have long argued for understandings of race, citizenship, and belonging that are not confined to national boundaries. My research extends these formulations beyond the Atlantic to consider Black diasporic imaginaries and resistances to nationalist racism in the Mediterranean. The Black Mediterranean, I argue, is a contemporary limit case where colonial legacies, neoliberal migration management, and sedimented anti-Blackness have come together to produce both new forms of exclusion and new practices of transnational solidarity.