This article discusses the fraught relationship between legal citizenship and Black belonging as depicted in the works of two Black Italian women writers. The protagonists in the short story “Salsicce” (“Sausages”) by Igiaba Scego and the novella Kkeywa: Storia di una bimba meticcia by Carla Macoggi resist multiple forms of dispossession and struggle to hold on to the autonomy of their self-identification and cultural attachments. Both Scego and Macoggi affirm the necessity to reclaim the power of self-definition, self-representation, and political agency when reckoning with the citizenship project and its inherent exclusions. Thus, these writings showcase the importance of studying the dynamic body of Black literature in Italian and offer us insight into some of the racialized, gendered, and religious negotiations of Italian sociopolitics for Black people navigating life throughout Italy and the Mediterranean.

I argue that Black contemporary poetry disrupts ideas of linear progress and neat conceptions of subjectivity. The poets I am thinking with explicate the complexities of Blackness that cannot fit neatly into the formulation of the modern liberal subject. I utilize Hortense Spillers’ framework of the American grammar in her essay “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book” along with other Black feminist thinkers and literary theorists to explore Black contemporary poetry’s capacity for moving beyond the grammatical impulses of “the human.” This project will add to an already rich and growing field of Black thinkers rejecting humanism as well as exploring the boundaries of tension between what is and what is not considered formal poetry. First, I look at rapper Tierra Whack’s 2017 song “Mumbo Jumbo,” which I argue utilizes incomprehensible sound to gesture towards an alternative to the American grammar. In my second section, I analyze Evie Shockley’s poem “Sex Trafficking Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl in the USA (Or the Nation’s Plague in Plain Sight)” from her 2017 book semiautomatic as disrupting time through her re-appropriation of language. Finally, I read Douglas Kearney’s poem “SWIMCHANT FOR NIGGER MER-FOLK (AN AQUABOOGIE SET IN LAPIS)” from his 2017 edition of THE BLACK AUTOMATON as utilizing both sound and the written to depict the all-encompassing violence of grammar towards a new alternative.

Dominant narratives of immigration are inextricably linked to race and the focus is almost exclusively on non-Black Latinx populations, invisibilizing Black migrants and their experiences in these narratives. We know that Black immigrants are overrepresented in arrests and deportations, not solely as a function of their legal status, but rather as a consequence of being Black in America. We also know that, unlike other immigrants, who’s “foreignness” marks them as other, shaping their interaction with the legal system, Black immigrants experience hyper-surveillance, criminalization, are pathologized, and are funneled through the U.S. carceral system at alarmingly high rates. In order to disrupt the violence of erasure, this thesis uses storytelling as a Black Feminist method and political praxis to explore undocuBlack women’s interiority which serves as a wild and sacred dream space to self-make. This work is made possible because what is understood about home, belonging, and representation is not taken for granted, and what Black women feel and know is real and valid. Using an interdisciplinary framework, this thesis centers the narratives of five undocuBlack women to describe the possibilities of Black social life and world making that they create. Together these narratives elucidate how undocuBlack subjects: make home spaces in light of geographic dispossession, practice self-making through autonomy and the use of interiority, and illuminate the potential for belonging through rightful, accurate, and meaningful representation.