Contradictory forces, facts and tendencies

ABSTRACT This article draws upon the ‘contradictory forces, facts and tendencies’ central to sociologist, historian, activist and cultural theorist W.E.B. Du Bois’ framing of race, and places them within a metaphysical and sociological analysis of exclusionary frameworks in contemporary Italy. Problematizing the formation of global black perspectives, this text intends to initiate an exchange that may foster the development of strategies, language and tools needed for the making of a new narrative in the Italian context, a narrative that cannot be realized without a profound reflection on the historical trajectory of cultural exchange between the African continent and the territory known as Italy extending back into antiquity. Drawing upon the dialogue initiated in the Young Gifted and Black Italia (Y.G.B.I.) Research Residency, a range of interviews carried out over the past decade and a half, and several research platforms developed by Black History Month Florence (B.H.M.F.), I hope to highlight the potential for collective approaches that have the potential to provide the scaffold for Italian specific meditations with transnational implications. Calling for multiplicities in relation to social and psychological understandings of displacements and states of post-displacement in Italy, this writing seeks a contextually grounded positionality that, however hindered by the chauvinism of nationalistic narrations of history, imply an inclusion that need not be validated. In so doing I intimate an Italian-ness that is as conscious of how it is framed through its own making, as it is aware of the framing devices applied from abroad.