Alessandra Di Maio
Research Project
The Black Mediterranean. Migratory Routes, Narratives and Artistic Practices from the Contemporary African Diaspora
Project Abstract
Alessandra Di Maio’s book-length project aims to offer a compendium of state-of-the-art investigations into how the African Diaspora, revived by the recent Mediterranean migratory waves, is represented in contemporary Italian and Black Mediterranean countercultural practices as opposed to mainstream narratives.
Since antiquity, Italy has acted as a bridge between Africa and Europe, favoring the exchange of goods, crops, legends, people, and gods. In recent years, this century-old connection has been brought to the world’s attention by way of the sea routes that have transformed the Mediterranean basin into one of the major crossroads in the global migrant chessboard. Today the Central Mediterranean Route connecting Africa to Europe via Italy is crossed by countless migrants. In her formulation of the Black Mediterranean, she demonstrates how today’s global capitalism exploits labor from Africa, reinforcing the power-unbalanced European-African axis, perpetuating and perpetrating violations of basic human rights, reminiscent of the slave-trade era. However, the other side of the coin is that Afro-Mediterranean migrations produce cultural practices that shape global culture.
In Italy, the history of the Black Mediterranean has been primarily narrated by legal texts and mass media, which have portrayed migrants as narrated objects rather than individual narrating subjects. The goal of her study is the reconstruction of a plural written, visual, and cross-media narrative of Afro-Mediterranean migration through the too-often fragmented visions and voices of those who have experienced it first-hand, or those who have chosen to engage with it creatively. The scholarly output will be a monograph that draws from cultural, literary, and visual studies as well as from an array of sociological texts, including those in migration, diaspora, translation, and Mediterranean Studies. She envisions that the volume, with the tentative title The Black Mediterranean: Migratory Routes, Narratives and Artistic Practices from the Contemporary African Diaspora, will symbolically and practically initiate an ongoing dialogue based on public program initiatives between the port cities of Palermo (Sicily) and Marseille through their cultural institutions and associations.
Biography
Alessandra Di Maio is a Professor in the Department of Humanities at the University of Palermo, Italy. She holds an Italian doctorate in Comparative Studies and Literary Sciences and a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. A scholar of Black, Migration, and Diaspora Studies, she has extensively worked on Black Italy and theorized the Black Mediterranean, with a particular attention to how issues of ethnicity, gender, representation, narration, memory and forgetting interact in the formation of national and transnational identities. She has been the recipient of a Fulbright scholarship, a UCLA Mellon postdoctoral fellowship, a MacArthur Research and Writing Grant, and a Richard D. Cohen fellowship at the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University.
Among her publications Tutuola at the University: The Italian Voice of a Yoruba Ancestor (2000), An African Renaissance (ed. 2006), Wor(l)ds in Progress: A Study of Contemporary Migrant Writings (2008), Dedica a Wole Soyinka (ed. 2012), La letteratura nigeriana in lingua inglese (2020), and the forthcoming Black Italia (2024). She has translated into Italian several authors from Africa and the Diaspora, including Nigerian Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka, with whom she has conceived the poetry/photo anthology Migrazioni/Migrations (2016) and guest edited Transition 60th Anniversary Special Issue “The Black in the Mediterranean Blue” (2021). She is the editor of the African Literary Series for Milan-based publisher Francesco Brioschi Editore.
