Alessandra Di Maio est résidente FIAS / Iméra pour l’année académique 2024-25. Son projet de recherche à l’Iméra, Institut d’études avancées d’Aix-Marseille Université s’articule autour de la rédaction d’une monographie qui vise à offrir un compendium des recherches les plus récentes sur la manière dont la diaspora africaine, ravivée par les récentes vagues migratoires en Méditerranée, est représentée dans les pratiques contre-culturelles italiennes et méditerranéennes noires, par opposition aux récits dominants.
L’objectif de son étude est la reconstruction d’un récit pluriel écrit, visuel et trans-média sur la migration afro-méditerranéenne, à travers les visions et les voix souvent fragmentées de ceux qui l’ont vécue directement, ou de ceux qui ont décidé de s’y engager de manière créative. L’ouvrage, dont le titre provisoire est La Méditerranée Noire : Routes migratoires, récits et pratiques artistiques de la diaspora africaine contemporaine, initiera symboliquement et pratiquement un dialogue continu basé sur des initiatives de programmes publics entre les villes portuaires de Palerme (Sicile) et Marseille à travers leurs institutions et associations culturelles.
Pour en savoir plus, consultez sa page résidente en cliquant ici
Transcription générée par intelligence artificielle (modèle de reconnaissance vocale Whisper), sans relecture humaine à ce jour. Elle peut comporter des erreurs, en particulier sur les noms propres, les termes spécialisés et les passages en langue étrangère. En cas de doute, l’enregistrement fait foi.
Transcription de la vidéo
Cliquez sur un horodatage pour lancer la vidéo au passage correspondant.
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.
