169 © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 G. Proglio et al. (eds.), The Black Mediterranean, Mediterranean Perspectives, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51391-7_9 CHAPTER 9 L’Italia Meticcia? The Black Mediterranean and the Racial Cartographies of Citizenship Camilla Hawthorne C. Hawthorne (*) Sociology and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies, University of California, Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz, CA, USA e-mail: camilla@ucsc.edu If we think of the Mediterranean not as the centre of an ‘us’ surrounded by difference, imperfection…if we think of it instead as a tableau of differences, exchanges, and inheritances, we will begin to see the global dimensions of thought itself. (Gnisci 1998, p. 48) [P]eople of African ancestry with Italian citizenship are also routinely per- ceived as permanent cultural outsiders…The sense that Africans cannot pos- sibly be Italian and are therefore socially peripheral at best is experienced regularly. (Merrill 2018) I am an Italian with black skin, not a black woman who feels Italian. (Affricot 2015)