Reversing the Gaze

What if the Other Were You?

Genevi Ve Makaping

FOREWORD BY CATERINA ROMEO

TRANSLATED BY VICTORIA OFFREDI POLETTO AND GIOVANNA BELLESIA CONTUZZI

“A bold statement about language, identity, and belonging. Makaping’s unparalleled dissection of white Italy is fearless, unnerving, and unfailingly accurate. Without doubt the foundational text of Black Italian studies.”

—Derek Duncan, co-editor of Transnational Modern Languages: A Handbook

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 as the Other. “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.

GENEVIÈVE MAKAPING is Adjunct Professor in French Language & Culture at the University of Mantova and has also taught English at the high school level since 2013. Makaping was born in Cameroon and has lived in Italy since 1982. The subject of the 2022 documentary Maka, she was also the first Black editor of an Italian daily newspaper, La Provincia cosentina, and of a television channel, Metrosat.

VICTORIA OFFREDI POLETTO (Senior Lecturer Emerita) and GIOVANNA BELLESIA CONTUZZI (Professor and Chair) have taught and collaborated together in the Department of Italian Studies at Smith College since 1990. They are committed to bringing the voices of migrant and second-generation women writers to the English-speaking world.

Other Voices of Italy

226 pp 5 x 8

978-1-9788-3468-2 paper $24.95T

978-1-9788-3469-9 cloth $64.95SU

January 2023

Memoir • Cultural Studies

Table of Contents

Foreword

Author’s Note

1. The Anthropological Journey of a Bamileke Immigrant Woman

2. End of the Anthropological Journey of a Bamileke Immigrant 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 Bibliography Glossary Translators’ Note Editor’s Note About the Author and Translators