Archives of Futurity

Archives of Futurity traces how contemporary Afro-Italian women artists and media makers craft a poetics of refusal at the edges of a nation haunted by its absented colonial past and truncated archives. Moving through sound, image, language, and performance, the book follows practices that refuse demands for transparency and translation, accenting instead opacity and relationality as conditions for livable futures. Rather than seeking inclusion in stories that cast Black and brown lives as crisis or afterthought, these works disengage from the terms of recognition and assemble counter-imaginaries that fracture Italianness. Reading across literature, film, visual and sonic arts, Archives of Futurity situates contemporary Afro-Italian cultural production within counter-archival traditions that reconsider what counts as evidence, whose stories endure, and how history is felt. Drawing on Dionne Brand, Saidiya Hartman, Tina Campt, Christina Sharpe and others, the book theorizes refusal as an aesthetic, feminist, diasporic practice that withholds itself from extractive demands for visibility and explanation. Attentive to quiet gestures as much as spectacular interventions, it traces how artists create architectures of presence in which Afro-Italian life can gather, breathe, and imagine otherwise. In these pages, refusal becomes an opening: an invitation to inhabit Italy - and its futures -through rhythms, grammars, and ways of listening that exceed the nation’s inherited scripts.