Journal Lecture of the Geographica Helvetica at the virtual GeoWoche2021 will be delivered by Camilla Hawthorne on October 5th at 7pm (CET) and is titled: Black Mediterranean Geographies. Please find the abstract below.
To participate in the lecture, please sign up to the conference. Registration is for free; the lecture will take place on zoom.
For more information and to register: https://www.phil.uni-passau.de/en/geography-section/geowoche2021/
Please find more information on the Geographica Helvetica here: https://www.geographica-helvetica.net/
About the book
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 work 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—which currently occupies a marginal position in global theorizations of racisms that are typically oriented on North America and the Atlantic—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 (rather than purely regional or methodologically nationalist) scale. [Im Anschluss an die GeoWoche erscheint der Vortrag auf Deutsch und Italienisch in der Geographica Helvetica]
