Description
Book SynopsisTired of being scrutinized, criticized, and fetishized for her black skin, Cameroon-born scholar Geneviève Makaping turns the tables on Italy’s white majority, regarding them through the same unsparing gaze to which minorities have traditionally been subjected. As she candidly recounts her experiences—first across Africa and then as a migrant Black woman in Italy—Makaping describes acts of racist aggression that are wearying and degrading to encounter on a daily basis. She also offers her perspective on how various forms of inequality based on race, color, gender, and class feed off each other.
Reversing the Gaze invites readers to confront the question of racism through the retelling of everyday occurrences that we might have experienced as victims, perpetrators, or witnesses.
Trade Review“Combining memoir with the social sciences, Makaping tells us about the challenges of being a black woman in Italy, how double consciousness takes on new meanings, and why the color line remains an unresolved question in twenty-first-century Europe. A pioneering text, a fundamental read.”— Alessandra Di Maio, author of Wor(l)ds in Progress: A Study of Contemporary Migrant Writings
"A bold statement about language, identity, and belonging. Makaping’s unparalleled dissection of white Italy is fearless, unnerving, and unfailingly accurate. Without doubt the foundational text of Black Italian studies."— Derek Duncan, co-editor of Transnational Modern Languages: A Handbook
Table of ContentsForeword: Producing Transnational Black Studies with an Intersectional Approach
Caterina Romeo
Translators’ Note
Giovanna Bellesia Contuzzi and Victoria Offredi Poletto
Editor’s Note
Simone Brioni
Reversing the Gaze Introduction: My Nonaligned Feminism
Geneviève Makaping
1. The Anthropological Journey of a Bamileke Immigrant Woman
2. End of the Anthropological Journey of a Bamileke Woman
3. My Not Very Personal Diary
4. To Belong, But to Which Tribe?
5. Call Me
Negra 6. The Difficulty of Dialoguing within the Margin
7. The Anthropology of the Other
8. Harassment and More
9. Daily Experiences
10. The Many Shades of Black
11. Participant Observation of an Eccentric Subject
Acknowledgments
Glossary
References
About the Author, Editor, and Translators
