Reversing the Gaze: What If the Other Were You? [Hardcover]

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. 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 are subjected.Reversing the Gaze offers a unique perspective on otherness and the work we must do to create a truly inclusive society. GENEVIÈVE MAKAPING is an adjunct professor in French language and culture at the University of Mantova in Italy, and has taught English at the high school level since 2013. Makaping was born in Cameroon and has lived in Italy since 1982. 

SIMONE BRIONI is an associate professor in the Department of English at Stony Brook University in New York. He is the author of The Somali Within: Language, Race and Belonging in Minor Italian Literature and editor of Shirin Ramzanali Fazel’s Islam and Me: Narrating a Diaspora (Rutgers University Press).

VICTORIA OFFREDI POLETTO (Senior Lecturer Emerita) and GIOVANNA BELLESIA CONTUZZI (Professor and Chair) have taught and collaborated together in thel[