The Politics of Thin Description in Black Italian Life-Writing

This essay investigates how Black Italian activist literature employs minimalist techniques to represent the social world. Kossi Komla-Ebri’s Imbarazzismi (2002) and Geneviève Makaping’s Traiettorie di sguardi (2001) use concise lists of microaggressions to foreground the systemic racial inequalities that have shaped Italian society. Building on Heather Love’s understanding of ‘thin description’, I argue that these experience-based accounts shift focus from subjective intent to social patterns, privileging discriminatory outcomes over personal stories in their critique of everyday racism. I further demonstrate that both authors embrace a poetics of affective detachment, whereby they respond to quotidian discrimination through embodied forms of objectivism. This type of critical testimony has gained wide currency in recent years, as Espérance Hakuzwimana’s E poi basta (2019) shows, developing into a microgenre that seeks to effect social change through a strategic redescription of ordinary life.