Being black but not Black? Diasporic identities in France, across the Atlantic, and across the Mediterranean

Through the concept of the Black Mediterranean, Camilla Hawthorne explores the ways in which the plantation and slavery are productive ways to think about the politics of Blackness in Europe and in Italy (2021, 2022). Which promises does this work hold for a European debate on Black Geographies and how does it extend or speak to decolonial and post-colonial debates? My engagement with the questions around the politics of Blackness shifts the geographical perspective from Italy to France. At the junction of southern and northern Europe, France has not been the main focus so far in considerations of the Black Mediterranean, but the centrality of the Mediterranean in the French colonial empire is a good reason to include it. My perspective is informed by my extensive fieldwork in a marginalized social housing neighborhood of Grenoble. I carried out participatory action research as part of the Université Populaire, a community-based people's education initiative that organized a series of debates on the question: what is left of the colonial past (2016–2018)?