Alessandra Di Maio is a FIAS/Iméra resident for the 2024-25 academic year. Her research project at Iméra, the Institute for Advanced Studies of Aix-Marseille University, focuses on writing a monograph aimed at offering a compendium of the latest research on how the African diaspora, revitalized by recent migratory waves in the Mediterranean, is represented in Italian and Mediterranean Black countercultural practices, as opposed to dominant narratives.
The goal of her study is to reconstruct a pluralistic narrative—written, visual, and transmedia—about Afro-Mediterranean migration, through the often fragmented visions and voices of those who have directly experienced it, or those who have chosen to engage with it creatively. The book, provisionally titled *The Black Mediterranean: Migration Routes, Narratives, and Artistic Practices of the Contemporary African Diaspora*, will symbolically and practically initiate a continuous dialogue based on public program initiatives between the port cities of Palermo (Sicily) and Marseille through their cultural institutions and associations.
To learn more, view her resident page by clicking here
Transcript generated by artificial intelligence (Whisper speech recognition model), not yet checked by a human. It may contain errors, particularly in proper nouns, specialised terminology and passages in other languages. Where there is any doubt, the recording prevails.
Video transcript
Click a timestamp to play the video from that point.
0:06 you My name is Alessandra Di Maio and I'm a professor of English literature and post-colonial studies at the University of Palermo in Italy, where I relocated after having spent several years in the United States. I'm a scholar of African diaspora studies, of migration and transnational studies, and of critical race theory. I'm interested in issues of social and racial justice, and one of my concerns is how human rights intersect with the humanities. I've dedicated my life as a researcher, as an educator, and as a translator of Anglophone
0:49 African literature into Italian, to combine literature and the arts, the humanities and social sciences. I've extensively worked on Black Italy and on Black Europe in general. More specifically, I worked on the Black Mediterranean formulation that I coined and theorized years ago and that has become a burgeoning field of study. It's interesting interesting I have a joint FIAS-IMERA fellowship, which I'm going to use to systematize and develop my research on the Black Mediterranean in a monograph. The goal of my study is to reconstruct the plural narrative of the Black Mediterranean
1:35 through the voices and the visions of those who experience it firsthand, or those who, no matter where they're from, have engaged with it creatively. Writers, musicians, filmmakers, digital artists, cultural activists. Sicily has been a crucial site of the African diaspora since antiquity. Sicily, hence Italy, functions as a corridor into fortress Europe. I've been studying how this Mediterranean migratory junction, which according to the UN is the most problematic in the world, has contributed to transform the migratory global
2:20 chessboard. Challenging notions of roots, belonging, legality, citizenship, nationality. Calling for new connections across spaces, languages and cultural productions. What is clear is that global capitalism continues to exploit labour from Africa, perpetrating and perpetuating the power. unbalance between Africa and Europe and violation of human rights, reminding us that we're still in the wake of the slave trade. It's just a new chapter. The other side of the coin is that Afro-Mediterranean migrations produce cultural practices that shape global culture.
3:08 This history has been mainly narrated by legal texts and the mainstream media that have portrayed migrants collectively as narrated objects rather than as individual narrating subjects. I cannot think of a better place than Imerha to work on my book On the Black Mediterranean. I feel blessed to be working within such a cohort of fellows and the directors and the staff and everybody. And in a port city whose history, universities, museums, associations, public programming and even the streets are food for thought and nourishment for the soul.
