Today we talk with Camilla Hawthorne about her recent edited collection, The Black Geographic: Praxis, Resistance, Futurity, and its relation to her prior monograph, Contesting Race and Citizenship: Youth Politics in the Black Mediterranean. She explains and elaborates on how Blackness is not singular, but involved in “taking place” in imaginative, resistant, and across many different political terrains, whether it be citizenship, the right to the city, the imagining of futures after environmental collapse, and diverse linguistic, cultural, and musical affiliations across diasporic communities.
Camilla Hawthorne is Associate Professor of Sociology and Critical Race & Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and also serves as program director and faculty member for the Black Europe Summer School in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Her work addresses the racial politics of migration and citizenship and the insurgent geographies of the Black Mediterranean. Camilla is co-editor of the The Black Mediterranean: Bodies, Borders, and Citizenship (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021) and The Black Geographic: Praxis, Resistance, Futurity (Duke University Press, 2023), and is author of Contesting Race and Citizenship: Youth Politics in the Black Mediterranean (Cornell University Press, 2022). In 2020, she was named as one of the national Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera‘s 110 "Women of the Year" for her work on the Black diaspora in Italy. Camilla received her PhD in Geography from the University of California, Berkeley in 2018.