Black Spaces (el. knyga) (skaityta knyga) | Heather Merrill | knygos.lt

Aprašymas

Black Spaces examines how space and place are racialized, and the impacts on everyday experiences among African-Italians, immigrants, and refugees. It explores the deeply intertwined histories of Africa and Europe, and how people of African descent negotiate, contest, and live with anti-blackness in Italy.



The vast majority of people who die in the Mediterranean crossing into Europe are from West Africa and the Horn of Africa. Their deaths in the crossing have been normalized. However, this erasure does not begin and end in the new crossing space of North Africa and the Central Mediterranean Sea. As Heather Merrill demonstrates, racialized spaces are also being produced in the interiors of Italy, in camps and detention centers, occupied buildings, and public spaces of everyday interaction. Black Spaces examines these racialized spaces by blending a critical geographical approach to place and space with Afro-Pessimist and critical race perspectives on the lived experiences of blackness and anti-blackness in Italy. Merrill's theory of Black spaces advances an approach to blackness as spatially and relationally produced, experienced, and challenged. Black spaces signal profoundly racialized symbolic and material sites, how these are embodied, and how they are negated from plain sight, filtered out of what we believe is worth knowing or not knowing.