Blackness and Borderscapes: Queering the Black Mediterranean
SA Smythe
President’s Postdoctoral Fellow
Department of Gender & Sexuality Studies
UC Irvine
MONDAY, APRIL 2
12:00PM
Black Forum Room | Haines Hall 153
In this presentation, Dr. SA Smythe addresses recent challenges in the regulation of legal residency and pathways to citizenship in Italy. Smythe reads contemporary Black Italian women’s writing to consider the stakes of cultural belonging, human rights, and the Italian literary canon in the constitution of the Black Mediterranean. They think alongside Black, Trans, and Mediterranean Studies scholars to expose the material and psychological violence of Frontex Europe and the legacies of colonial and fascist Italy by discussing the politics of citizenship and cultural production without relying on the desire to redeem or reconcile its legal hierarchies.
Dr. SA Smythe is a UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Gender & Sexuality Studies at the University of California, Irvine. Their book manuscript, Crisis and the Canon: Shifting Representation Regimes in the Black Mediterranean, is a transdisciplinary project that examines racialized aporias in the narration of italianità in the Black Mediterranean from the Risorgimento (Italian Unification) to the present. The monograph is a meditation on canonicity and citizenship in the wake of Europe’s self-initiated “crises” of migration and attendant levels of dispossession. SA is president and founder of the Queer Studies Caucus of the American Association of Italian Studies and publishing editor of
