Euroblack: Race and Immigration in Contemporary Afro-European Literature

"Euroblack: Race and Immigration in Contemporary Afro-European Literature" investigates how five novels of the late 1990s and 2000s in French, Portuguese, and Italian explore complex configurations of "blackness" in Europe. Drawing from work on European racism, African diaspora, postcolonialism, and migrant literatures, this project considers the value and stakes of reading these texts as black European or Afro-European literature in ways that account for the significance of migration but take seriously the conceptual power of race, especially for those whose right to belong to Europe is frequently called into question based on the ascription of racial otherness. The texts I analyze---by Jadelin Gangbo, Bessora, Sami Tchak, and Germano Almeida---assess dominant forms of racialization in France, Italy, and Portugal, probe the effectiveness of oppositional gestures, and envision the critical and creative possibilities of a transnational European minority literature. This project situates the texts' insistent destabilization of identity categories such as "black" and "immigrant" within the context of a continental European discourse of race-blindness that, while refusing to acknowledge race as a legitimate category, projects race onto "outsiders" and constructs outsiders as a threat to European identity. Reading the novels as literary interventions in this context, I show that they are not just concerned with rejecting essentialist categories, but also with exploring the roles that black European texts may play as they are marketed, circulated, and interpreted by the public and within academic circles. These texts, in other words, scrutinize both experiences of racialization in Europe and the expectations, assumptions, and categorizations that greet the narrations of such experiences. Through this comparative approach to recent Afro-European fiction, I suggest that the texts offer critical perspectives on the work this study performs: gathering them into a provisional category in order to explore how the idea of Europe is interrogated, negotiated, transformed, and rewritten by its minority and migrant authors.