GH-Journal Lecture mit Camilla Hawthorne: "Black Mediterranean Geographies" bei der GeoWoche

24 September 2021

Am 05.10.2021 um 19 Uhr veranstaltet die Geographica Helvetica im Rahmen der GeoWoche eine Journal Lecture mit Camilla Hawthorne zu "Black Mediterranean Geographies". Interessierte sind herzlich eingeladen, an der Veranstaltung teilzunehmen. Bei Interesse bitte einfach für die GeoWoche anmelden, um den Zoom-Zugang zu erhalten (die Anmeldung ist kostenlos): https://www.phil.uni-passau.de/fachbereich-geographie/geowoche2021

Kurzfassung/Abstract: Black Mediterranean Geographies

Camilla Hawthorne, University of California, Santa Cruz, Department of Sociology

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.