In this contribution, I will focus on the explorations of racial violence in the texts of contemporary US Black poets. Using experimental styles and voices, these poets have delved into the Black experience of systemic racism, examining its traditional forms and its current transformations. These include racial profiling, microaggressions, the prohibition of specific words and theoretical approaches, and the practices of selection and control of the population exercised through federal programs, as well as the manipulation of information. The discussion will draw upon the works of Jericho Brown, Claudia Rankine, and Harryette Mullen, who have employed innovative stylistic techniques, transcending the conventional boundaries of literary genres to interrogate the pervasive influence of white supremacy on language and the imagination.

Bionote: Renata Morresi is currently a researcher in American literature at the University of Padua. Morresi’s research focuses on questions arising from encounters across different languages and cultures, the interplay of gender, race and class, multilinguism and experimental writing. She has translated works by authors such as Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Margaret Atwood, and Louis Zukofsky, and has written extensively on modernist authors, especially Nancy Cunard and Claude McKay, and on transnational and intercultural themes, including the Black Renaissance and transatlantic modernism.

Assuming a transnational perspective, this paper reflects on recent Italian theater productions that have employed blackface and colorblind casting, two opposing approaches to the performative representation of race that originated in the US. Blackface emerged in the 1840s in the American South, where white actors used burnt cork and greasepaint to perform denigratory black stereotypes. Beyond legitimizing slavery and segregation for over a century, this dehumanizing practice also granted white actors privileged access to leading black roles in mainstream theater. Conversely, since the 1950s, colorblind casting has sought to provide black actors with equal employment opportunities by assigning them roles originally written for white actors, particularly in canonical plays. Loosely defined as casting the best actor for a role regardless of race, colorblind casting has been alternately criticized as assimilationist and praised as inclusive. As part of a transnational repertoire of racial representations shaped by the transatlantic slave trade and colonialism, blackface and colorblind casting have circulated in Italy at different times and in varying ways, reflecting the country’s shifting racial identity. Examining mainstream Italian theater productions from 2012 to 2022, this paper shows that while blackface remains largely unproblematized, the adoption of colorblind casting has been slow, sporadic, and selective. These intertwined phenomena highlight the persistence of colonial attitudes toward blackness and the resistance to transnational critical race discourses and anti-racist artistic practices that could foster the inclusion of black actors and spectators in the Italian theater system.

Bionote: Rapetti is a Postdoctoral Fellow in Anglo-American Literature.

In this presentation, I will discuss how the memories of the colonial past and transatlantic slavery are conceptualized in Brazilian antiracist discourse, primarily referencing the works of Lélia Gonzalez (1935-1994) and Beatriz Nascimento (1942-1995), prominent antiracist figures and scholars whose work has significantly influenced Black feminism and the Black movement in Brazil. Both authors develop their reflections on the idea that although colonialism as a formal system of economic, legal, political, and social domination has ended, it continues to be reproduced in other forms of oppression based on race, gender, and class. Policies of genocide against Indigenous peoples, those against Africans enslaved in the transatlantic slavery system, the African diaspora, as well as anti-Black and anti-Indigenous racism, are all elements that contribute to the kind of memories of colonialism and slavery that have been largely legitimized in Brazilian national identity discourse and that erase the African and Indigenous subjectivities. Utilizing the notion of the Amefrican archive, which is a dynamic process in which past memories, stories, gestures, and words of resistance are recovered and reactivated in the present, I intend to explore how Black communities and individuals resisted racism, sexism, and class exploitation. I will analyze the concepts of Amefricanity and quilombo as used in the works of Gonzalez and Nascimento to examine the connections between bodies, territories, and knowledge, and how these connections produce temporalities that reposition the past in the present.

Bionote: Ribeiro Corossacz is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University Roma Tre.

Several YAL works that have been published in the last decade following the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement, the most important form of US black protest since the Civil Rights Movement, focus on the black protagonist’s discovery that race is still a prominent factor in their lives and they continue to be seen as black in the supposedly postracial United States. They problematize interracial friendships and relationships, delving into the fear of black activism, unawareness of privilege and racial resentment that Robin DiAngelo has called “white fragility,” and harm the development of real solidarity working against racist violence and injustice. My paper will investigate the narrative strategies through which these texts try to turn anxious, self-defensive and at times confrontational white partners and friends into antiracist allies.

Bionote: Anna Scacchi teaches Anglo-American Literature at the University of Padua. Her research has focused on U.S. language policies and multilingualism in literature, children’s and young adult literature, racial discourses and representations, and contemporary memories of slavery in U.S. literature and culture, with a particular attention to gender and race dynamics. Among her recent publications are Transatlantic Memories of Slavery (with Elisa Bordin, Cambria Press 2015), Post-racial America Exploded: #BlackLivesMatter Between Social Activism, Academic Discourse, and Cultural Representation (with Gianna Fusco, RSA Journal 2018), Saint-Domingue/Haiti: L’altra Rivoluzione americana (with Sonia Di Loreto, Acoma 2020), Blackness, America nera e nuova diaspora africana (with Elisa Bordin, Acoma 2022), On the Beat: Owning/Reclaiming Time against White Chronocentrism (with Marco Petrelli, FES 2024).