Making Italy: Afro-Italian entrepreneurs and the racial boundaries of citizenship

This article, based on 16 months of in-depth interviews and participant observation conducted over five years, explores the participation of young Afro-Italian women entrepreneurs in new initiatives related to Black beauty, style, and (natural) hair care. While based primarily in northern Italy, these projects draw on economic and cultural connections to the broader Black diaspora. I argue that entrepreneurship has emerged as an important strategy for Afro-Italian women seeking to advance new narratives about Blackness (and specifically, Black womanhood) and its inclusion within the material and symbolic boundaries of Italy. At the same time, Afro-Italian entrepreneurship is transforming Italian material culture, and, by extension, the meanings of Italianness itself. Entrepreneurship is thus a key terrain of struggle through which Afro-Italians have begun to assert claims to Italian citizenship and belonging in the context of both economic stagnation and a refugee ‘emergency‘. It is one example of a nascent Black spatial politics in Italy that is conditioned by, but also pushes back against, dominant regimes of racist exclusion and neoliberal racial capitalism.