Reversing the Gaze: What If the Other Were You? (Other Voices of Italy)

Tired of being scrutinized, criticized, and fetishized for her black skin, Cameroon-born scholar Geneviève Makaping turns the tables on Italy’s white majority, regarding them through the same unsparing gaze to which minorities have traditionally been subjected. As she candidly recounts her experiences—first across Africa and then as a migrant Black woman in Italy—Makaping describes acts of racist aggression that are wearying and degrading to encounter on a daily basis. She also offers her perspective on how various forms of inequality based on race, color, gender, and class feed off each other. __Reversing the Gaze__ invites readers to confront the question of racism through the retelling of everyday occurrences that we might have experienced as victims, perpetrators, or witnesses. "What if the Other were you? What if we were the Other? Being part of an environment is second nature to many of us. For others, it is not. Others are perceived as not belonging to by virtue of their language, appearance, skin color, way of dressing, gesticulating, and speaking. In this book, Geneviève Makaping denounces the structural racism of contemporary Italy, emphasizing the way in which diverse forms of inequality-race, color, gender, class-intersect and feed off each other. Drawing on her own experiences, Geneviève Makaping spins the customary gaze of anthropology around, and the gaze that in colonial ethnography was directed at the so-called uncivilized indigenous and Black peoples, now focuses on the white majority as seen from her point of view. She-a Black Italian woman, whom the white gaze often sees as the Other-has chosen the path of participant observation in order to study the white majority: "I gaze at myself who gazes at them who have always gazed at me." This reversal of perspective forces white people who are used to being characterized by "normality" rather than by "whiteness," to experience what it is like to constantly be "the Other". Geneviève Makaping's book-challenging, original, incisive-stimulates reflection. It forces readers, not just in Italy but all over our increasingly globalized world, to become aware of and to confront the question of racism through the retelling of everyday occurrences that we might have experienced as victims, perpetrators, or witnesses. But above all it urges us-all of us-to decide what side "we" are on and what community "we" belong to. It ultimately poses the fundamental question of who "we" are"-- Provided by publisher Contents Foreword: Producing Transnational Black Studies with an Intersectional Approach Translators’ Note Editor’s Note Introduction: My Nonaligned Feminism 1 The Anthropological Journey of a Bamileke Immigrant Woman 2 End of the Anthropological Journey of a Bamileke Woman 3 My Not Very Personal Diary 4 To Belong, But to Which Tribe? 5 Call Me Negra 6 The Difficulty of Dialoguing within the Margin 7 The Anthropology of the Other 8 Harassment and More 9 Daily Experiences 10 The Many Shades of Black 11 Participant Observation of an Eccentric Subject Acknowledgments Glossary References Notes on Contributors Tired of being scrutinized, criticized, and fetishized for her black skin, Cameroon-born scholar Geneviève Makaping decided to turn the tables on Italy's white majority, regarding them through the same unsparing gaze to which minority people were subjected. Reversing the Gaze offers a unique perspective on Otherness, inequality, the intersection of racism and sexism and the hard, honest work we must do to create a truly inclusive society.