Abstract
Following the rise of the #MeToo movement, the social isolation that followed the Covid-19 pandemic and the global ascent of the Black Lives Matter movement, there has been an increase in discussions and initiatives on digital platforms. In Italy, the alignment of these various phenomena has created a new fertile ground that helped the proliferation of discussions on race related issues arguably for the first time. These have been mainly led by second generation/ racialised Italians (the terminology used to define this group is still being debated in Italy, within the community itself). This article considers the forms of digital activism that developed in Italy, specifically in the years between 2020-2023, and how these tried to disrupt forms of structural racism, epistemic violence, silencing and question the concept of allyship. It draws upon postcolonial feminist theory and the concept of intersectionality to explore how the #BLM movement provided an opportunity to address various forms of oppression in Italy.The research combines autoethnographic analysis of the sociological podcast ‘Sulla Razza' [On Race] with interviews to four prominent female activists in Milan
- Ataç, I., Kron, S., Schilliger, S., Schwiertz, H., & Stierl, M. (2015). Struggles of migration as in-/visible politics: Introduction. Movements: Journal for Critical Migration and Bborder Regime Studies, 1(2), 1-18. https://wrap. warwick.ac.uk/id/eprint/115069/7/WRAP-struggles-migration-in-visible-politics-Stierl-2015.pdf
- Bailey, M. (2021). Misogynoir transformed: Black women's digital resistance. New York University Press.
- Banaji, S. interviewed by Nwonka, C. (2022). Transcript: In Conversation with Shakuntala Banaji. Sarah Parker Remond Centre, 20 Apr., https://www.ucl.ac.uk/racism-racialisation/transcript-conversation-shakuntala-banaji
- Bennett, W. L., & Segerberg, A. (2013). The Logic of Connective Action: Digital media and the personalization of contentious politics. Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/ CBO9781139198752
- Bhabha, H. K. (1996). Culture’s in-between. In S. Hall and P. du Gay (eds), Questions of Cultural Identity (pp. 53-60). SAGE.
- Bhambra, G. K. (2014). Postcolonial and decolonial dialogues. Postcolonial Studies, 17(2), 115–121. https://doi.org/ 10.1080/13688790.2014.966414
- Bianchi, R., & Scego, I. (2014). Roma negata. Percorsi postcoloniali nella città, Rome, Ediesse.
- Calhoun, C. J. (1992). Habermas and the public sphere. MIT Press.
- Caponio, T. (2008). (Im)Migration research in Italy: A European comparative perspective. The Sociological Quarterly, 49(3). http://www.jstor.org/stable/40220078
- Chawla, D., & Atay, A. (2018). Introduction: Decolonizing autoethnography. Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies, 18(1), 3-8. https://doi.org/10.1177/1532708617728955
- Collins, P. H. (2000). Black feminist thought: Knowledge, consciousness, and the politics of empowerment (2nd ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203900055
- Comberiati, D., & Mengozzi, C. (2023). Storie condivise nell’Italia contemporanea: Narrazioni e performance transculturali. Corocci Editore. https://doi.org/10.4000/12KPN
- Corti, P., & Sanfilippo, M. (2012). L’Italia e le Migrazioni. Laterza.
- Crenshaw, K. (1989). Demarginalizing the intersection of race and sex: A black afeminist critique of antidiscrimination doctrine. Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics, 1, 139–67.
- Crowley, H., & Himmelweit, S. (1992). Knowing women: Feminism and knowledge. Polity.
- De Franceschi, L. (2022). Migrazioni, cittadinanze, inclusività. Narrazioni dell’Italia plurale, tra immaginario e politiche per la diversità. tab edizioni.
- Dutta, M. J. (2018). Autoethnography as decolonization, decolonizing autoethnography: Resisting to build our homes. Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies, 18(1), 94-96. https://doi.org/10.1177/1532708617735637
- Fabbri, G., & Romeo, C. (2023), Podcasting race: Participatory media activism in postcolonial Italy. In B. B. Blaagaard, S. Marchetti, S. Ponzanesi and Shaul Bassi (eds), Postcolonial Publics: Art and Citizen Media in Europe, Studi e ricerche 30. Edizioni Ca’ Foscari. https://doi.org/10.30687/978-88-6969-677-0/003
- Falk, F. (2010). Invasion, infection, invisibility: An iconology of illegalized immigration. In C. Bischoff, F. Falk and S. Kafehsy (eds), Images of illegalized immigration: Towards a critical iconology of politics (pp. 83-100). Transcript Verlag. https://doi.org/10.14361/transcript.9783839415375.83
- Federici, S. (2012). Revolution at point zero: Housework, reproduction, and feminist struggle. PM Press.
- Fernando, N., Mancuso, M. C., & Uyangoda, N. (2021). ‘Femminismo Intersezionale’. Sulla razza. 30/06/2021
- Fernando, N., Mancuso, M. C., & Uyangoda, N. (2023). 'Attivismo Performativo’. Sulla Razza. 24/04/2023
- Fernando, N., Mancuso, M. C., & Uyangoda, N. (2023). 'Le Vite Nere Contano’. Sulla Razza. 20/03/2023
- Finozzi, A. (2023). Podcasting the Italian Postcolonial: An analysis of Black Coffee and S/Confini. The Italianist, 43(1), 156–173. https://doi.org/10.1080/02614340.2022.2167326
- Gajjala, R. (2019). Digital diasporas: Labor, affect and technomediation in South Asia. Lexington Press. https://doi.org/10.5040/9798881813147
- Gajjala, R. (2021). Performing gender and ethics of care through digital protests and protest archiving. Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, 37(2), 119-120. https://dx.doi.org/10.2979/jfemistudreli.37.2.08
- Garcia, S. (2021). Amplifying sonic resistances across Abya Yala. Norient. https://norient.com/sonia-garcia/amplifying-sonic-resistances-across-abya-yala (Accessed 18 March 2024).
- Gerbaudo, P., & Treré, E. (2015). In search of the ‘we’ of social media activism: Introduction to the special issue on social media and protest identities. Information, Communication & Society, 18(8), 865–871. https://doi.org/ 10.1080/1369118X.2015.1043319
- Giuliani, C. (2021). home, memory and belonging in Italian postcolonial literature. Springer Nature.
- Gutiérrez-Rodríguez, E. (2014). Domestic work–affective labor: On feminization and the coloniality of labor, Women's Studies International Forum, 46, 45-53. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wsif.2014.03.005
- Haraway, D. (1988). Situated knowledges: The science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective. Feminist Studies, 14(3), 575-599. https://doi.org/10.2307/3178066
- Hawthorne, C. (2019). Black matters are spatial matters: Black geographies for the twenty‐first century. Geography Compass, 13(11), e12468. https://doi.org/10.1111/gec3.12468
- Hill Collins, P. (2012). Looking back, moving ahead: Scholarship in service to social justice. Gender & Society, 26(1), 14–22. https://doi.org/10.1177/0891243211434766
- Kavada, A. (2015). Creating the collective: Social media, the occupy movement and its constitution as a collective actor. Information, Communication & Society, 18(8), 872-886. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2015.1043318
- Lewis, C., Regis, T., & Ofori-Addo, G. (2021). Sociological podcasting: Radical hope, care and solidarity in a time of crisis. Soundings, 79(79), 94–109. https://doi.org/10.3898/SOUN.79.06.2021
- Lombardi-Diop, C. (2012). Postracial/postcolonial Italy. In C. Lombardi-Diop and C. Romeo (eds), Postcolonial Italy: Challenging national homogeneity (pp. 175-190). Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137294 227_11
- Lombardi-Diop, C., & Romeo, C. (2014). L’Italia postcoloniale. Le Monnier-Mondadori.
- Madison, D. S. (2012). Critical ethnography: Methods, ethics, and performance (2nd ed.). SAGE.
- Mazzara, F. (2015). Spaces of visibility for the migrants of Lampedusa: The counter narrative of the aesthetic discourse. Italian Studies, 70(4), 449-464. https://doi.org/10.1080/00751634.2015.1102958
- Mendes, K., Ringrose, J., & Keller, J. (2019). Digital feminist activism: Girls and women fight back against rape culture. Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190697846.001.0001
- Narayan, K. (1993). How native is a 'native' anthropologist? American Anthropologist, 95(3), 671-686. https://doi.org/10.1525/aa.1993.95.3.02a00070
- Onay, O. (2024). Navigating racialisation and whiteness: British Turks’ Struggles for belonging in multiscale public spaces within the UK. Journal of Ethnic and Cultural Studies, 11(2), 105–122. https://doi.org/ 10.29333/ejecs/1964
- Piedade, V. (2017). Dororidade. Editoria Nós.
- Pleyers, G. (2020). The Pandemic is a battlefield. Social movements in the COVID-19 lockdown. Journal of Civil Society, 16(4), 295–312. https://doi.org/10.1080/17448689.2020.1794398
- Ponzanesi, S., & Blaagaard, B. (2011). In the name of Europe. In S. Ponzanesi and B. Blaagaard (eds), Deconstructing Europe: Postcolonial perspectives (pp. 1-10). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.1080/13504630.2011. 531901
- Sobande, F. (2020). The digital lives of black women in Britain. Palgrave. https://doi.org/0.1007/978-3-030-38455-3
- Sobande, F., & Basu, M. (2023). Beyond BAME, WOC, and ‘political blackness’: Diasporic digital communing practices. Communication, Culture & Critique. https://doi.org/10.1093/ccc/tcad012
- Taylor, C. (1991). The ethics of authenticity. Harvard University Press.
- Uyangoda, N. (2021), L’unica persona nera nella stanza. 66thand2nd.
APA 7th edition
In-text citation: (Fernando, 2026)
Reference: Fernando, N. E. (2026). Racialised Italians’ response to #BLM: Forms of solidarity, activism and community building on digital spaces.
Feminist Encounters: A Journal of Critical Studies in Culture and Politics, 10(1), Article 5.
https://doi.org/10.20897/femenc/17886
AMA 10th edition
In-text citation: (1), (2), (3), etc.
Reference: Fernando NE. Racialised Italians’ response to #BLM: Forms of solidarity, activism and community building on digital spaces.
Feminist Encounters: A Journal of Critical Studies in Culture and Politics. 2026;10(1), 5.
https://doi.org/10.20897/femenc/17886
Chicago
In-text citation: (Fernando, 2026)
Reference: Fernando, Nathasha Edirippulige. "Racialised Italians’ response to #BLM: Forms of solidarity, activism and community building on digital spaces".
Feminist Encounters: A Journal of Critical Studies in Culture and Politics 2026 10 no. 1 (2026): 5.
https://doi.org/10.20897/femenc/17886
Harvard
In-text citation: (Fernando, 2026)
Reference: Fernando, N. E. (2026). Racialised Italians’ response to #BLM: Forms of solidarity, activism and community building on digital spaces.
Feminist Encounters: A Journal of Critical Studies in Culture and Politics, 10(1), 5.
https://doi.org/10.20897/femenc/17886
MLA
In-text citation: (Fernando, 2026)
Reference: Fernando, Nathasha Edirippulige "Racialised Italians’ response to #BLM: Forms of solidarity, activism and community building on digital spaces".
Feminist Encounters: A Journal of Critical Studies in Culture and Politics, vol. 10, no. 1, 2026, 5.
https://doi.org/10.20897/femenc/17886
Vancouver
In-text citation: (1), (2), (3), etc.
Reference: Fernando NE. Racialised Italians’ response to #BLM: Forms of solidarity, activism and community building on digital spaces. Feminist Encounters: A Journal of Critical Studies in Culture and Politics. 2026;10(1):5.
https://doi.org/10.20897/femenc/17886