Heather Merrill - Academia.edu (original) (raw)
Papers by Heather Merrill
Routledge eBooks, May 25, 2018
White fragility: Why it's so hard for White people to talk about racism. Beacon Press.
Geografiska Annaler Series B-human Geography, Mar 9, 2023
Generations of African and Black Italians are extending the boundaries of what it means to be Ita... more Generations of African and Black Italians are extending the boundaries of what it means to be Italian, in the face of denial, diversion, and an insistence on whiteness as the measure of inclusion, and humanity. Drawing on Allan Pred's work on racist geographies of the everyday and taken-for-granted in Sweden, I advance the concepts of B/black spaces and relational places to approach to the study of identity, belonging, and place in Black Europe, with a focus on Italy. Black and African Italians from diverse origins and generations are asserting their belonging in Italy. Pred's work on every day situated practices, power relations, taken-for-granted knowledge, and silences, is useful to contemporary scholarship in Black geographies, antiracist and decolonial scholarship. Pred's holistic studies of modernity and the impacts of global political and economic transformations in lived experiences demonstrate the centrality of racism to national societies and cultures. His work is valuable to scholars of modern Western colonial systems of knowledge production and power, advancing insights and encouraging new directions based on abundant, ordinary yet silenced everyday realities and experiences. This paper expands on Pred's work through an analysis of Blackness, place and belonging in Italy, offering an approach to the study of African Diaspora in Europe.
New York University Press eBooks, Dec 31, 2022
Gender Place and Culture, Jun 1, 2004
This article discusses racialized politics among women in Turin, Italy, utilizing and expanding N... more This article discusses racialized politics among women in Turin, Italy, utilizing and expanding Neil Smith's concept of the spatial politics of scale specifically in relation to an anti‐racist organization, Alma Mater, that emerged during the early 1990s. International migration is relatively recent in Italy, and popular responses over the past decade have been both supportive and hostile. Overt and implicit expressions of racism and intolerance toward migrants have become apparent throughout the country. Migrant and Italian women have retaliated by engaging in a politics of space and scale to effect local and national labor and cultural practices. Through an examination of every day cultural–ideological practices and their links to broad political and economic processes I examine the relative success of Alma Mater in its ability to challenge scales and add to an understanding of the social production and reproduction of power relations at all scales.
ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies, 2014
The emergence of Italy as a receiving country of postcolonial immigrants from all over Africa and... more The emergence of Italy as a receiving country of postcolonial immigrants from all over Africa and other parts of the economically developing world involves the reproduction of deeply rooted prejudices and colonial legacies expressed in territorial concepts of belonging. Yet geographical discussions of borders seldom begin their explorations from the vantage point of what Hanchard has called, "Black life worlds", complex experiences of place among African diasporic populations in relationship to race. This paper examines situated practices, negotiations, and meanings of place, identity and belonging among first generation African-Italians in Northern Italy whose experiences suggest that the borders between Africa and Europe are far more porous than they appear to be. This essay develops a theory of relational place to study the meaning of place in Black life worlds as indexed by the everyday materiality of bodies in relation to racial discourses and practices, and the profound interweavings of Africa and Europe through space and time. The essay examines African-Italo experiences in relation to the transformation of political culture in Turin, the rise of ethno-nationalism, and legacies of Italian colonialism. It is not just the dominant ideas and political practices, but the marginal, the implausible, and the popular ideas that also define an age.
Routledge eBooks, May 25, 2018
Antipode, Jun 1, 2011
Abstract: This paper examines how regional and national identities are being reshaped through the... more Abstract: This paper examines how regional and national identities are being reshaped through the spatialization of race in Italy. Neoliberal globalization expands the spatial mediation of historically layered racialized anxieties. In the context of African in-migration, black is emerging as a ...
Geopolitics, May 1, 2007
This article addresses the increasing militarisation of the Italian borders and the establishment... more This article addresses the increasing militarisation of the Italian borders and the establishment of detention centres reminiscent of concentration camps as a state response to potential immigrants, asylum seekers and others. We suggest that this militarisation should be ...
Geografiska Annaler Series B-human Geography, Mar 8, 2023
We are living in what geographer Allan Pred called an “extended moment of danger.” Accelerations ... more We are living in what geographer Allan Pred called an “extended moment of danger.” Accelerations of capitalist modernity have for decades yielded new sensibilities and situations that have given way to crises of democracy across the globe. While the sentiment that we are living in precarious time has been expressed by many over the years, we believe it to be extraordinarily apt today, and that Allan Pred’s later work offers a set of illuminations and methods with which to interrogate, re- present, and make the dangers more intelligible. In this introduction to the special issue “Brute Facts: Hauntings, Racisms and Collective Amnesia” we contend that his work (e.g., concepts of situated ignorance; collective amnesia; the taken-for-granted) helps us understand the intensification of deep and abiding global problems. Pred advanced a way to re-think accepted philosophies of history, progress, goodness, cultural boundedness and other taken-for-granted ideas that are often complex and difficult to make sense of. He developed approaches to examining how political economic shifts impact and are reworked in local, everyday experiences and collective identities, giving rise, for example, to changing dominant discourses of power and contestations created by social subjects in differentially situated locations of gender, race, class, and ethnicity. ARTICLE HISTORY Received 13 February 2023 Accepted 16 February 2023
University of Georgia Press eBooks, 2015
Light in dark times / Paul Rabinow -- Making sense of our contemporary moment of danger / Heather... more Light in dark times / Paul Rabinow -- Making sense of our contemporary moment of danger / Heather Merrill and Lisa M. Hoffman -- Angelus novus (from back) / Trevor Paglen -- It\u27s time : the cultural politics of memory in the current moment of danger / Katharyne Mitchell -- Skinning the skinning / Gunnar Olsson -- From Allan\u27s notes on Benjamin / Trevor Paglen -- Exposing the nation : entanglements of race, sexuality, and gender in post-Apartheid nationalisms / Gillian Hart -- In other wor(l)ds : situated intersectionality in Italy / Heather Merrill -- Monumental memory, moral superiority, and contemporary disconnects : racisms and noncitizens in Europe, then and now / Damani J. Partridge -- From Allan\u27s notes on Benjamin / Trevor Paglen -- The city and economic geography : then and now / Richard Walker -- Situated spectacle : cross-sectional soil hermeneutics of the Shanghai 2010 World Expo / Shiloh Krupar -- Angelus novus / Trevor Paglen -- Insurgent spaces : power, place, and spectacle in Nigeria / Michael J. Watts -- Even in plurinational Bolivia : indigeneity, development, and racism since Morales / Nancy Postero -- Moving targets and violent geographies / Derek Gregory -- A Bronx chronicle / Cindi Katz., On July 22, 2011 a 32 year old far right activist clothed as a police officer opened fire on a Labor Party youth camp on Utoya Island in Norway, slaughtering 69 people and maiming many more. The vast majority of the victims were between 14 and 19 years of age. He also placed bombs in a government building in Oslo, killing 8 and wounding others. In a 1,500 page manifesto in English posted on the internet hours before the massacres in which he referred to himself as a Marxist hunter, he declared preemptive war, targeting Cultural Marxists who propagate a multiculturalist, ideology to which he attributed the decay of Western European and American civilization and culture and the promotion of a pro-Islamic Eurabia. What is compelling about this story is less what the content of the killer\u27s easily downloadable manuscript reveals about far right thinking, than how the significance of the event was concealed and silenced as it was interpreted for the public by journalists and political figures. By characterizing Breivik as an evil \u27aberration\u27 and abstracting his acts from the social and political context in which they took place, persuasive political arbiters and media reproduced what Allan Pred referred to as situated ignorance, keeping people from attaining a more accurate knowledge and understanding of the events --, Includes bibliographical references and index.https://digitalcommons.tacoma.uw.edu/urban_books/1022/thumbnail.jp
GeoJournal, 2002
GeoJournal 58: 167175, 2002. © 2003 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands. ... ... more GeoJournal 58: 167175, 2002. © 2003 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands. ... Inside and outside Italian political culture: Immigrants and diasporic politics in Turin ... Heather Merrill1 and Donald Carter2 1Department of Anthropology, Dickinson ...
Geografiska Annaler: Series B, Human Geography, 2023
We are living in what geographer Allan Pred called an “extended moment of danger.” Accelerations ... more We are living in what geographer Allan Pred called an “extended moment of danger.” Accelerations of capitalist modernity have for decades yielded new sensibilities and situations that have given way to crises of democracy across the globe. While the sentiment that we are living in precarious time has been expressed by many over the years, we believe it to be extraordinarily apt today, and that Allan Pred’s later work offers a set of illuminations and methods with which to interrogate, re- present, and make the dangers more intelligible. In this introduction to the special issue “Brute Facts: Hauntings, Racisms and Collective Amnesia” we contend that his work (e.g., concepts of situated ignorance; collective amnesia; the taken-for-granted) helps us understand the intensification of deep and abiding global problems. Pred advanced a way to re-think accepted philosophies of history, progress, goodness, cultural boundedness and other taken-for-granted ideas that are often complex and difficult to make sense of. He developed approaches to examining how political economic shifts impact and are reworked in local, everyday experiences and collective identities, giving rise, for example, to changing dominant discourses of power and contestations created by social subjects in differentially situated locations of gender, race, class, and ethnicity.
ARTICLE HISTORY
Received 13 February 2023 Accepted 16 February 2023
Routledge eBooks, May 25, 2018
White fragility: Why it's so hard for White people to talk about racism. Beacon Press.
Geografiska Annaler Series B-human Geography, Mar 9, 2023
Generations of African and Black Italians are extending the boundaries of what it means to be Ita... more Generations of African and Black Italians are extending the boundaries of what it means to be Italian, in the face of denial, diversion, and an insistence on whiteness as the measure of inclusion, and humanity. Drawing on Allan Pred's work on racist geographies of the everyday and taken-for-granted in Sweden, I advance the concepts of B/black spaces and relational places to approach to the study of identity, belonging, and place in Black Europe, with a focus on Italy. Black and African Italians from diverse origins and generations are asserting their belonging in Italy. Pred's work on every day situated practices, power relations, taken-for-granted knowledge, and silences, is useful to contemporary scholarship in Black geographies, antiracist and decolonial scholarship. Pred's holistic studies of modernity and the impacts of global political and economic transformations in lived experiences demonstrate the centrality of racism to national societies and cultures. His work is valuable to scholars of modern Western colonial systems of knowledge production and power, advancing insights and encouraging new directions based on abundant, ordinary yet silenced everyday realities and experiences. This paper expands on Pred's work through an analysis of Blackness, place and belonging in Italy, offering an approach to the study of African Diaspora in Europe.
New York University Press eBooks, Dec 31, 2022
Gender Place and Culture, Jun 1, 2004
This article discusses racialized politics among women in Turin, Italy, utilizing and expanding N... more This article discusses racialized politics among women in Turin, Italy, utilizing and expanding Neil Smith's concept of the spatial politics of scale specifically in relation to an anti‐racist organization, Alma Mater, that emerged during the early 1990s. International migration is relatively recent in Italy, and popular responses over the past decade have been both supportive and hostile. Overt and implicit expressions of racism and intolerance toward migrants have become apparent throughout the country. Migrant and Italian women have retaliated by engaging in a politics of space and scale to effect local and national labor and cultural practices. Through an examination of every day cultural–ideological practices and their links to broad political and economic processes I examine the relative success of Alma Mater in its ability to challenge scales and add to an understanding of the social production and reproduction of power relations at all scales.
ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies, 2014
The emergence of Italy as a receiving country of postcolonial immigrants from all over Africa and... more The emergence of Italy as a receiving country of postcolonial immigrants from all over Africa and other parts of the economically developing world involves the reproduction of deeply rooted prejudices and colonial legacies expressed in territorial concepts of belonging. Yet geographical discussions of borders seldom begin their explorations from the vantage point of what Hanchard has called, "Black life worlds", complex experiences of place among African diasporic populations in relationship to race. This paper examines situated practices, negotiations, and meanings of place, identity and belonging among first generation African-Italians in Northern Italy whose experiences suggest that the borders between Africa and Europe are far more porous than they appear to be. This essay develops a theory of relational place to study the meaning of place in Black life worlds as indexed by the everyday materiality of bodies in relation to racial discourses and practices, and the profound interweavings of Africa and Europe through space and time. The essay examines African-Italo experiences in relation to the transformation of political culture in Turin, the rise of ethno-nationalism, and legacies of Italian colonialism. It is not just the dominant ideas and political practices, but the marginal, the implausible, and the popular ideas that also define an age.
Routledge eBooks, May 25, 2018
Antipode, Jun 1, 2011
Abstract: This paper examines how regional and national identities are being reshaped through the... more Abstract: This paper examines how regional and national identities are being reshaped through the spatialization of race in Italy. Neoliberal globalization expands the spatial mediation of historically layered racialized anxieties. In the context of African in-migration, black is emerging as a ...
Geopolitics, May 1, 2007
This article addresses the increasing militarisation of the Italian borders and the establishment... more This article addresses the increasing militarisation of the Italian borders and the establishment of detention centres reminiscent of concentration camps as a state response to potential immigrants, asylum seekers and others. We suggest that this militarisation should be ...
Geografiska Annaler Series B-human Geography, Mar 8, 2023
We are living in what geographer Allan Pred called an “extended moment of danger.” Accelerations ... more We are living in what geographer Allan Pred called an “extended moment of danger.” Accelerations of capitalist modernity have for decades yielded new sensibilities and situations that have given way to crises of democracy across the globe. While the sentiment that we are living in precarious time has been expressed by many over the years, we believe it to be extraordinarily apt today, and that Allan Pred’s later work offers a set of illuminations and methods with which to interrogate, re- present, and make the dangers more intelligible. In this introduction to the special issue “Brute Facts: Hauntings, Racisms and Collective Amnesia” we contend that his work (e.g., concepts of situated ignorance; collective amnesia; the taken-for-granted) helps us understand the intensification of deep and abiding global problems. Pred advanced a way to re-think accepted philosophies of history, progress, goodness, cultural boundedness and other taken-for-granted ideas that are often complex and difficult to make sense of. He developed approaches to examining how political economic shifts impact and are reworked in local, everyday experiences and collective identities, giving rise, for example, to changing dominant discourses of power and contestations created by social subjects in differentially situated locations of gender, race, class, and ethnicity. ARTICLE HISTORY Received 13 February 2023 Accepted 16 February 2023
University of Georgia Press eBooks, 2015
Light in dark times / Paul Rabinow -- Making sense of our contemporary moment of danger / Heather... more Light in dark times / Paul Rabinow -- Making sense of our contemporary moment of danger / Heather Merrill and Lisa M. Hoffman -- Angelus novus (from back) / Trevor Paglen -- It\u27s time : the cultural politics of memory in the current moment of danger / Katharyne Mitchell -- Skinning the skinning / Gunnar Olsson -- From Allan\u27s notes on Benjamin / Trevor Paglen -- Exposing the nation : entanglements of race, sexuality, and gender in post-Apartheid nationalisms / Gillian Hart -- In other wor(l)ds : situated intersectionality in Italy / Heather Merrill -- Monumental memory, moral superiority, and contemporary disconnects : racisms and noncitizens in Europe, then and now / Damani J. Partridge -- From Allan\u27s notes on Benjamin / Trevor Paglen -- The city and economic geography : then and now / Richard Walker -- Situated spectacle : cross-sectional soil hermeneutics of the Shanghai 2010 World Expo / Shiloh Krupar -- Angelus novus / Trevor Paglen -- Insurgent spaces : power, place, and spectacle in Nigeria / Michael J. Watts -- Even in plurinational Bolivia : indigeneity, development, and racism since Morales / Nancy Postero -- Moving targets and violent geographies / Derek Gregory -- A Bronx chronicle / Cindi Katz., On July 22, 2011 a 32 year old far right activist clothed as a police officer opened fire on a Labor Party youth camp on Utoya Island in Norway, slaughtering 69 people and maiming many more. The vast majority of the victims were between 14 and 19 years of age. He also placed bombs in a government building in Oslo, killing 8 and wounding others. In a 1,500 page manifesto in English posted on the internet hours before the massacres in which he referred to himself as a Marxist hunter, he declared preemptive war, targeting Cultural Marxists who propagate a multiculturalist, ideology to which he attributed the decay of Western European and American civilization and culture and the promotion of a pro-Islamic Eurabia. What is compelling about this story is less what the content of the killer\u27s easily downloadable manuscript reveals about far right thinking, than how the significance of the event was concealed and silenced as it was interpreted for the public by journalists and political figures. By characterizing Breivik as an evil \u27aberration\u27 and abstracting his acts from the social and political context in which they took place, persuasive political arbiters and media reproduced what Allan Pred referred to as situated ignorance, keeping people from attaining a more accurate knowledge and understanding of the events --, Includes bibliographical references and index.https://digitalcommons.tacoma.uw.edu/urban_books/1022/thumbnail.jp
GeoJournal, 2002
GeoJournal 58: 167175, 2002. © 2003 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands. ... ... more GeoJournal 58: 167175, 2002. © 2003 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands. ... Inside and outside Italian political culture: Immigrants and diasporic politics in Turin ... Heather Merrill1 and Donald Carter2 1Department of Anthropology, Dickinson ...
Geografiska Annaler: Series B, Human Geography, 2023
We are living in what geographer Allan Pred called an “extended moment of danger.” Accelerations ... more We are living in what geographer Allan Pred called an “extended moment of danger.” Accelerations of capitalist modernity have for decades yielded new sensibilities and situations that have given way to crises of democracy across the globe. While the sentiment that we are living in precarious time has been expressed by many over the years, we believe it to be extraordinarily apt today, and that Allan Pred’s later work offers a set of illuminations and methods with which to interrogate, re- present, and make the dangers more intelligible. In this introduction to the special issue “Brute Facts: Hauntings, Racisms and Collective Amnesia” we contend that his work (e.g., concepts of situated ignorance; collective amnesia; the taken-for-granted) helps us understand the intensification of deep and abiding global problems. Pred advanced a way to re-think accepted philosophies of history, progress, goodness, cultural boundedness and other taken-for-granted ideas that are often complex and difficult to make sense of. He developed approaches to examining how political economic shifts impact and are reworked in local, everyday experiences and collective identities, giving rise, for example, to changing dominant discourses of power and contestations created by social subjects in differentially situated locations of gender, race, class, and ethnicity.
ARTICLE HISTORY
Received 13 February 2023 Accepted 16 February 2023
Black Spaces: African Diaspora in Italy, 2018
Examines taken-for-granted racist acts and gestures in everyday spaces. Lived experiences of peop... more Examines taken-for-granted racist acts and gestures in everyday spaces. Lived experiences of people of African descent in Italy. Affective acts of nonverbal expression. The everyday violence and geography of racism.
Black Spaces: African Diaspora in Italy, 2018