Black Spaces

Heather Merrill is Professor of Africana Studies at Hamilton College. Her research examines place, space, race, belonging, Black Europe and the relationship between Europe and Africa. She is an anti-racist critical human geographer whose theoretical work is grounded in ethnography of African Diaspora in Italy. She is the co-editor of Spaces of Danger: Culture and Power in the Everyday and the author of An Alliance of Women: Immigration and the Politics of Race.

Heather Merrill has done it again. While her previous book broke new ground by studying the challenges of multi-racial feminist activism in Italy, this new contribution enlarges the picture. Here she takes aim at Italian common sense concerning race, while passionately foregrounding the lives of African migrants and Afro-Italians who daily navigate the deadly politics of exclusion. For all those who read with horror the headlines emanating from an increasingly anti-immigrant and antiBlack Europe, this book is for you. And for those who hold out hope that spaces of oppression may generate life-affirming possibilities, this book is also for you. Jacqueline Nassy Brown, Author of Dropping Anchor, Setting Sail: Geographies of Race in Black LiverpoolA vital investigation of African migrant experiences in contemporary Italy, Black Spaces blends ethnographic methods and Black Pessimist theories to explore the material and symbolic meanings of social life and social death. This nuanced account of national and racial formations highlights mundane, and sometimes extraordinary, actions and utterances that bear witness to individual and collective examples of resistance to the erasure of African subjects from European civic life. Black Spaces is a formidable account of the workings of race and nation, power and relation in the modern era.Daphne Lamothe, Associate Professor of Africana Studies, Smith College

• 1. Witness to the Unthought Position: Introduction. 2. Africa-Italy: A Genealogy of Relational Places. 3. Black/black Spaces: Lived Experiences and Geographic logics. 4. Unarchived Everyday Violence. 5. Reading the death of Sylvester Agyemang: Can you be BLACK and bear this? 6. Grammar and Ghosts: Refugees and Migrants in Italy. 7. Re-imagining Future Geographies: Conclusion 8. Bibliography. 9. Timeline. 10. Glossary.