When
16th Annual Jan Monk Distinguished Lecture:
Black Mediterranean Geographies
Dr. Camilla Hawthorne
Assistant Professor of Sociology
University of California, Santa Cruz
Abstract: In the wake of the 2015 Mediterranean refugee crisis, a growing number of scholars has increasingly turned to the “Black Mediterranean” as an analytical framework for understanding the historical and geographical specificities of Blackness in the Mediterranean region. This talk draws upon and extends Paul Gilroy’s powerful theorizations of the Black Atlantic by asking how Blackness is constructed, lived, and transformed in a region that has been alternatively understood as a “cultural crossroads” at the heart of European civilization, a source of dangerous racial contamination, and—more recently—as the deadliest border crossing in the world. But the Black Mediterranean is not a claim to any incommensurable difference or exceptionalism. In my talk, I draw on insights from Black, feminist, and postcolonial geographies to argue that the Mediterranean is actually a relational space that offers profound insights about the organization of the modern world. I argue that new solidaristic political formations in the Black Mediterranean (which are, in many cases, led by Black women) have the potential to challenge heteropatriarchal, arborescent constructions of nation-as-racial-family, and should prompt us to rethink the categories of race, gender, citizenship, and Blackness on a global scale.
Biography: Camilla Hawthorne is Assistant Professor of Sociology at UC Santa Cruz. She is a principal faculty member in the UCSC Critical Race and Ethnic Studies Program, and a faculty affiliate of the UCSC Science & Justice Research Center and Legal Studies Program. Camilla serves as Chair of the Black Geographies Specialty Group of the American Association of Geographers, and is a project manager and faculty member for the Black Europe Summer School in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. She received a PhD in Geography and Science & Technology Studies from UC Berkeley in 2018. Camilla’s current project explores the ways that citizenship has emerged as a key terrain of struggle over racial nationalism in Italy, and—bringing together insights from critical migration/citizenship studies and Black studies—argues that citizenship is crucial for understanding how racism and race are being reconfigured in the twenty-first century.