The Intersectional Counter-Gaze of Geneviève Makaping in Traiettorie di sguardi

Abstract

ABSTRACT Traiettorie di sguardi is a hybrid text – partly memoir, partly anthropological essay – in which for the first time in Italian literature the author as a Black woman reverses the colonial gaze and records the racist attitude of the Italian population toward Black people. Makaping thus rewrites a long ethnographic tradition in which Africans have constituted the object of observation rather than the subjects of epistemology and produces the first theoretical reflection elaborated by a Black Italian (woman) intellectual in the Italian language on structural racism in Italy as a legacy of colonialism.