Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
strove to carve out places of belonging in England in opposition to monolithic and ab-
solutist conceptions of British identity as white, male, and upper class. Where exclu-
sionary constructions of place have been addressed, there has been a tendency to con-
ceive of these problems in generalized terms influenced by color-blind ideologies in
the United States. Scholars have skirted around issues of race by discussing categories
of difference broadly conceived in a language of “intolerance,” “xenophobia,” or even
“cultural racism” toward immigrants whom local populations perceive as threatening
to their ways of life (Taguieff 1990; Miles 1993; Stolke 1995). As important as these
studies have been, they have fostered approaches that tend to underestimate or erase the
continuing impact of colonial histories, as well as the specific and ongoing weight of
European power, and struggles over recognition, place, and belonging among descend-
ents of Africa.
The flip side of this obfuscation of the significance of racialized identities and racism
to place can be found in studies which tend to conceive the lives of people in the Afric-
an Diaspora as though they operated in self-contained social worlds, where social re-
lations appear to exist in autonomous third dimensional spaces unconnected with wide
social, cultural, political, and economic processes (Gregory 1997; Brown 2005). Even
in Paul Gilroy's seminal work,
The Black Atlantic,
arguably the most influential work
of African Diasporic studies over the past two decades in which he problematized com-
mon struggles across African Diasporic spaces and places in the North Atlantic, there
is a tendency to reify diasporic space as a type of separate and distinct, closed cultural
place.
Rediscovering the significance of African histories and the contributions of people of
African descent to the making of the contemporary world is extremely important, yet
there is, as Jacqueline Nassy Brown has pointed, out some danger in conceiving of dia-
spora as itself aplace where oneis bydefinition boundedofffromEuropean society.As
Brown suggests, race is not autonomous from place (Brown 2005). Diasporic identities
aren't typically produced by communities that are suspended in-between national territ-
ories—even if they sometimes feel that way. Black experiences are situated in places
that are products of interconnected power relations and meanings, the long durée of co-
lonial histories, and the reworkings of the present.
I offer an analysis of the negotiations, and meanings of place, identity, and belonging
amongdiversefirstgeneration Africans inTurinwithwhomIhaveconducted extensive
field research for two decades (Merrill 2006). These Italo-Africans and their descend-
ents are as Stuart Hall put it, “taking back the Empire” as they make their presence in-
creasingly felt in the territories of former European colonial powers. They are part of
a renewed cycle of African Diasporic formation in which increased flows of migrants
and displaced peoples are forced to move from war or in search of work, what Achille
