Producing Transnational Black Studies with an Intersectional Approach

Reversing the Gaze is the translation of Geneviève Makaping’s Traiettorie di sguardi. E se gli altri foste voi?, a unique text in the context of Italian literature and culture in which the author, an Italian scholar of Cameroonian origins, articulates a complex reflection on race and processes of racialization as a legacy of colonialism and denounces systemic racism in contemporary Italy. Reversing the gaze of colonial ethnography, Makaping observes and records the racist attitude of the Italian population toward Black and other racialized immigrants in Italy, thus countering a long tradition in which Black Africans have been (considered as) observed objects, rather than theorizing subjects. Makaping’s postcolonial analysis is combined with an intersectional feminist approach through which Makaping questions the very notion of a universal sisterhood and shows how considering all women as equally oppressed by patriarchal systems allows white feminists to be oblivious of their white privilege. The hybrid form of Reversing the Gaze— a written narrative with an oral structure, partly diary, partly memoir, partly personal essay, partly anthropological essay— both mirrors the complexity and versatility of the author and testifies to the difficulty of shaping a text for which the author finds no models in her culture of origin.