The article advances the non-reied mapping of lived experiences of place in Black Spaces, active relational parts of Western ontologies, epistemologies of innocence, and symbolic and material geographies. Merrill explores the emergence of Black Aesthetic Spaces among AfroItalian artists, activists, and Black Italian lawyers who confront and rework being and belonging in conditions of racial modernity in the Italian context. Where citizenship and belonging are conferred on the basis of jus sanguinis or blood lineage, contestation of legal and symbolic borders coexists with denial that racialized subjectivities are ubiquitous.
Through her ethnogeographical concept of Black Spaces, she focuses on a group of Black Italian lawyers and artists who create AfroItalian Blackness through insightful non-binary reworkings of being and (be)longing, while also attending to crucial conditions of racialized and gendered social positioning.
