Progetti di ricerca

In the Maghreb, raising ethno-nationalism excludes Blackness from the national body. These racial tensions build on a long history of social differentiation that political, public, and academic discourses tend to reduce to a Black/white dichotomy. CHRoMa explores these current dynamics in light… Leggi tutto of earlier histories of racial differentiation. By addressing Maghrebi lexicons, grammars, and genealogies of race, the project cross-fertilises three disciplinary fields: Critical Race Theories and Methodologies, recent anthropological reflections on race, and history literature on race in the Maghreb. The objective is to study today’s Maghrebi patterns of racialisation through a bottom-up approach that grounds the understandings of racial identities within specific cultural, social, political, and religious contexts. An innovative method that starts from people’s lived experiences will prevent an essentialised and a priori reading of racial identities. On a broader comparative level, the project considers racialised hierarchies and political and personal spaces of resistance to racial discrimination across Maghrebi geographies, histories, and societies. Three are the ground-breaking shifts 1) to develop an analytical approach that combines nuances of colour with other discriminatory factors, thus moving beyond the Black/White dichotomy 2) to promote a Maghreb-centred approach to the study of processes of racialisation 3) to strengthen the emergent field of Southwest Asian and North African (SWANA) Critical Race Studies. The Maghreb is a privileged standpoint to narrate patterns of racialisation outside dominant Western thinking, as it is both a “post-colonial” and a “post-slavery” context. Case studies comprise the legacies of racialised slavery, the meanings of whiteness, racialised internal divisions within the “white” Amazigh population, the racialisation of Sub-Saharan migrants, and the new categories crafted by anti-racist activism.