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In this paper, I weave together insights from Black and postcolonial feminist theory and Black geographies to think through the theoretical and political provocations offered by the concept of the Black Mediterranean. First, I discuss the notion of the Black Mediterranean, and how it both draws upon and extends Paul Gilroy's Black Atlantic. Then, I turn to consider how the Black Mediterranean complicates universalizing narratives that read Blackness solely through the geographies of racial slavery and the plantation. From there, I reflect on the fraught but necessary work of translating Blackness across distinct yet interconnected global geographies and histories of racial formation. Finally, I conclude with lessons the Black Mediterranean offers for abolitionist, antiracist, anticolonial, and no-border struggles unfolding across the world in this political moment. The experiences of Black Italians (who are racialized subjects, former colonial subjects, and have direct connections to migration and border regimes) demonstrate the importance of developing more capacious political formations that are not oriented on descent-based, identitarian claims but rather on shared political visions, intertwined histories of struggle and resistance, and nonlinear diasporic entanglements that disrupt state systems of categorization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On July 19th, 2005, American Army Private First Class LaVena Johnson died in Balad, Iraq, just 8 days shy of her 20th birthday. On July 13th, 2015, almost 10 years later, 28-year-old Sandra Bland's life came to an abrupt end in a jail cell in Waller County, Texas. Both women's deaths were ruled suicides, and both women's families and friends reject these judgments. Instead, they insinuate foul play by the state, which directly governed the militarized spaces within which the women both died. At first glance, these women appear to have had very different life trajectories, one a United States soldier and the other a Black Lives Matter activist. However, in both of their cases, the ruling of the suspicious deaths as suicides illustrates the state's attempt to render their deaths banal, and thereby diminish the state's own culpability. In understanding the unremitting acts of violence, on women's bodies, especially women of color, this paper focuses on how a Black feminist praxis extends feminist notions of an ethics of care. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This autobiographical account of a black female feminist geographer's experiences with mentoring and success in the academy offers analysis, lessons and strategies. My distinctive graduate school experience, with a pioneering all-female feminist geographers dissertation committee, plus a complex mix of intentional and fortuitous multidimensional mentoring has contributed to a successful academic geography career. Yet, I've had to overcome obstacles stemming from intersections of gender and other forms of difference, primarily race and immigrant status. Although there are limits to mentoring practices that emphasize caring and collegiality, I highlight and recommend feminist-inspired mentoring strategies that forge alliances across race-ethnicity, gender, nationality, generation, institutional and locational differences as interventions that lessen the struggles, challenges or marginalization reported by many foreign-born black feminist geographers and other women of color in US institutions of higher education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this intervention, I raise questions for feminist geographers who use intersectionality in their work. First, I invite feminist geographers to consider their expertise in relation to the significance of locality and the role of social context as a crucial factor in intersectional analyses. Second, I query the focus on multiple axes of difference and question the need to focus on specific axes over others and how this may be resolved. Finally, the issue of methods in research about intersectionality is explored and I reflect upon research with ethnic and religious minority young people that adopted an approach informed by intersectionality in order to provide a focus for this discussion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]