Comparative Migration Studies volume 12 , Article number: 43 Cite this article. Metrics details. This article documents important spaces of experimentation which Black activists are creating within the Italian feminist movement to give voice to racialised migrant women without the mediating intervention of white feminists. Rooted in an understanding of the margins as a site of resistance, such efforts engage in practices of refusal and talking back to reclaim a Black epistemic identity which powerfully interpellates Italian institutions and feminist activists.
Black migrant women demand the recognition not only of their inherent capacity to speak, act, decide, but also of their ability to articulate a political analysis and a political project to challenge the intersectional discrimination and violence they face.
Their struggle centres work as a site of compounding gendered and racialised exploitation, thus carrying the potential to expand feminist thinking and action on reproductive labour, labour participation and equal pay.
A growing number of studies have recently focused on the activism of Black and other racialised women in Europe, pointing to the emergence of a distinct Afrofeminist perspective Bassel and Emejulu ; Emejulu and Sobande ; Hawthorne, While discussions on cultural diversity and migration have been circulating in feminist spaces since at least the s, examples of successful cross-cultural or cross-racial mobilisation are scarce.
Many Black and racialised women however move within and through these white spaces, either as activists, staff members of feminist organisations, or, more commonly, participants in projects designed to support or rescue migrant women, victims of trafficking and survivors of gender-based violence [GBV].
