California Italian Studies is seeking submissions for its thematic Issue 1 of Volume 14, provisionally entitled “Race and Blackness in Italy,” to be published in 2025.

Issue Editors: Camilla Hawthorne (UCSC) and Angelica Pesarini (University of Toronto).

This special issue invites critical, interdisciplinary, and comparative scholarship on Blackness and the cultural politics of racism and race in Italy. The past ten years have witnessed a powerful and transformative explosion of scholarship analyzing the geographical and historical specificities of racism in Italy. This work has addressed racism not as a Fascist historical aberration, a North American import, or the result of large-scale migration in the 1990s–but instead as fundamentally intertwined with the Italian nation-building process itself. This scholarship has similarly demonstrated that Blackness is not external or exogenous to Italy, but rather that ideas of Blackness have long played a central role in the articulation and contestation of the boundaries of Italianness. Much of this scholarship has also explicitly foregrounded the lives and experiences of Black communities in the Italian peninsula, historically and today. 

At the same time, this work has also opened up new and pressing questions for scholars in Italian Studies. How do we understand the specificities of Italian racism within the context of the global circulation of racist discursive practices in the post-1492 world? What analytical frameworks of difference can help us interpret representations of Blackness and Black lives in the Italian peninsula from the Renaissance and earlier historical periods? What new theoretical and political possibilities emerge when Italian Studies meets Black Studies?

This special issue seeks to bring together new work that represents the cutting edge of scholarship on race and Blackness in Italy. Potential submission themes include, but are not limited to:

• Contemporary Black Italian mobilizations against racism;
• Intersections of race, gender, nation, and citizenship during Liberal and Fascist Italy;
• Racial ideologies of Italian colonialism and their reverberations in the present;
• Representations of Blackness during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance;
• Histories of racial capitalism in Italy and the Mediterranean; 
• Italian racism(s) in global context–from Italian racial scientists' circulation among international eugenics networks, to the relationship between positivist criminology and U.S. immigration policies in the early twentieth century, to the global Black Lives Matter movement;
• Meta-theoretical analyses related to questions of transnational translation and the politics of critical race and postcolonial studies in Italy;
• Artistic and curatorial interventions aimed at re-centering the Black presence and Black histories in Italy. 

We welcome interventions that span disciplinary boundaries and methodological approaches such as archival research, ethnography, literary analysis, film and media studies, and more.

Submission

Please send preliminary contribution proposals (300-400 words) and a brief autobiographical note about yourself to Camilla Hawthorne (camilla@ucsc.edu) and Angelica Pesarini (angelica.pesarini@utoronto.ca). If your proposal is accepted, you will be expected to submit your essay for peer-reviewing by September 15, 2024 through the portal of our journal. Articles can also be submitted without preliminary proposals up until the September 15th deadline, but they are not guaranteed peer reviewing.

All submissions, whether in English or Italian, must follow our submission and formatting guidelines. Failure to meet both will result in the article being sent back to the author for correction at the risk of not meeting the deadline for acceptance.

Unless encouraged otherwise, submissions should not exceed 30 pages of double-spaced text or 10,000 words.

Submissions should fulfill at least one of the journal’s criteria for selection:

a) an interdisciplinary scholarly study that combines the practices of multiple disciplines, making significant use of the tools of one discipline in the service of another, or that studies a cluster of scholarly works representing the approaches of various disciplines to a single topic.

b) a comparative work that relates the history, culture, society, artistic products or languages of the Italian peninsula, islands and diasporas to other geographical, cultural and linguistic formations.

c) a critical work that, in studying a given object, engages in theoretical or methodological reflection on its own approach and its implications within larger disciplinary and interdisciplinary contexts.