Reversing the Gaze

What If the Other Were You?

By Geneviève Makaping; Translated by Giovanna Bellesia Contuzzi and Victoria Offredi Poletto; Edited by Simone Brioni

SERIES: Other Voices of Italy

Rutgers University Press

Tired 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.

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

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

GENEVIÈVE MAKAPING is an adjunct professor in French language and culture at the University of Mantova in Italy, and has taught English at the high school level since 2013. Makaping was born in Cameroon and has lived in Italy since 1982.

SIMONE BRIONI is an associate professor in the Department of English at Stony Brook University in New York. He is the author of The Somali Within: Language, Race and Belonging in Minor Italian Literature and editor of Shirin Ramzanali Fazel’s Islam and Me: Narrating a Diaspora (Rutgers University Press).

VICTORIA OFFREDI POLETTO (Senior Lecturer Emerita) and GIOVANNA BELLESIA CONTUZZI (Professor and Chair) have taught and collaborated together in the Department of Italian Studies at Smith College since 1990. They are committed to bringing the voices of migrant and second-generation women writers to the English-speaking world. Their many translations include Adrian Bravi’s My Language is a Jealous Lover, Gabriella Ghermandi’s Queen of Flowers and Pearls, and Cristina Ali Farah’s Little Mother.

CATERINA ROMEO is an associate professor of literary criticism and comparative literature at the Sapienza University of Rome, Italy. She is the author of Riscrivere la nazione. La letteratura italiana postcoloniale [Rewrite the Nation: Postcolonial Italian Literature.

Foreword: 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

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