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CU �Ǹ�Թ� scholar Michela Ardizzoni describes how podcasting is reshaping Italy’s conversations about race

On an episode of the podcast , hosted by Benedicta Djumpah, well-known art curator and historian Mistura Allison reflects on growing up in Italy.��

The daughter of a Nigerian-born immigrant who had lived in Italy since the age of 14, Allison said during the interview, “I didn’t have to chiedere il permesso di soggiorno, I never had to ask permission to exist.”

While acknowledging the privilege her Italian citizenship offered, and the challenges she faced when briefly moving to another country, Allison goes on to describe how her background helped shape her layered view of identity and why it’s okay to not fit into society’s predefined labels.��

Michela��Ardizzoni is an associate professor in the CU �Ǹ�Թ� Department of French and Italian.

The episode’s honest vulnerability is part of what drew Michela Ardizzoni, an associate professor of Italian at the �Ǹ�Թ�, into the growing wave of Afro-Italian podcasting.��

In , Ardizzoni examines how shows like Chronicles are reshaping Italy’s cultural conversations about race, identity and belonging.��

“Podcasting offers insight into forms of cultural production that are expanding the possibilities of public discourse in Italy,” Ardizzoni says.��

Following identity across media

Ardizzoni’s interest in the politics of Italian identity is as personal as it is professional.��

“I grew up in Italy, but I never experienced it as a single, uniform place. Different stages of my life took me from northern Italy to Sardinia, and later to different regions in the U.S.,” she says.��

“Those experiences made me increasingly interested in the relationship between media, place, and identity, and in the ways cultural narratives shape our understanding of belonging.”��

Ardizzoni spent her early years of scholarship examining how Italian television and film help define who “counts” as Italian. Podcasting, she says, is a refreshing departure from more institutional forms of media.��

“Podcasts offer a comparatively more open space for experimentation. They are less constrained by editorial conventions and more conducive to conversations that develop on the speakers’ own terms,” she explains.��

By giving creators greater freedom of expression, podcasts have opened new lines of dialogue about what it means to be Italian from one’s own perspective.��

“Rather than responding to questions framed by mainstream media, they [podcast hosts and guests] establish the agenda themselves, decide what deserves attention and shape the language through which their experiences are understood,” Ardizzoni says.��

A conversation without borders

One misconception Ardizzoni often hears from American audiences is that Blackness in Italy is a new phenomenon tied to recent immigration.��

“There are now multiple generations of Black Italians who were born and raised in Italy, whose cultural and linguistic lives are deeply rooted in the country,” she explains.��

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“Podcasting offers insight into forms of cultural production that are expanding the possibilities of public discourse in Italy,” says CU �Ǹ�Թ� scholar Michela Ardizzoni. (Photo: ConvertKit/Unsplash)

Djumpah’s podcast offers a view that better reflects the real world. Recorded almost entirely in English, the show regularly features guests who discuss their Italian upbringings and their connections to the wider diaspora across Africa, the U.K. and the U.S.��

“The decision to record in English is an important part of that vision. English allows the podcast to reach audiences well beyond Italy and creates a common space for dialogue among people connected by diaspora rather than nationality alone,” Ardizzoni says.

The result is conversations that refuse to treat being Italian as disconnected from broader dialogue about race.��

“It challenges the tendency to think about Italy as an exceptional or self-contained case and instead places Afro-Italian voices within the wider intellectual and cultural networks of the Black Atlantic and the Black Mediterranean,” Ardizzoni says.��

Making space for quiet

To make sense of what Djumpah and her guests are doing, Ardizzoni draws on scholar Kevin Quashie’s concept of “quiet.”

“Quashie's work has been influential because it places Black interiority at the center of how we understand Black life,” Ardizzoni explains.

He encourages a more holistic approach to understanding the human experience, including the emotional, imaginative and reflective dimensions each of us shares.��

Ardizzoni adds that these “interior worlds” shouldn’t be relegated to the side stages behind political life. Rather, they are what give us meaning and agency with which to imagine ourselves and our futures.��

“Black subjectivity, in this sense, encompasses far more than public resistance. It also resides in the ordinary, intimate and deeply personal aspects of everyday life,” she adds.��

This idea of “quiet” also shapes how a show like Chronicles can be understood. It isn’t a platform built to counter racism through acts of resistance or protest but rather by giving guests a space where they are simply allowed to be whole.��

That dynamic is evident when listening to an episode.��

“[Djumpah’s] conversations move fluidly among family, friendship, artistic practice, spirituality, work, music and memory. Listeners encounter guests as artists, daughters, friends, professionals and thinkers whose lives unfold across many registers at once,” Ardizzoni says.��

Look closely, and you’ll see the same thread running through Allison’s reflection on never needing to ask permission to exist. Chronicles doesn’t ask guests to justify their belonging. It gives them a platform to make their voices and experiences heard.��

That act of acceptance, Ardizzoni argues, is what makes the show so radical in a media landscape unaccustomed to letting Black lives simply exist.��

Refusing the status quo

Ardizzoni’s latest research is one piece of a much larger exploration of contemporary Afro-Italian women artists across literature, film, photography and digital media.��

“This article is part of a broader research project that culminates in my forthcoming book, Archives of Futurity: Afro-Italian Women's Imaginaries and Poetics of Refusal (2027), which will be published by Liverpool University Press in its Transnational Italian Cultures series,” she says.��

At the heart of her writing is a concept she calls refusal—not just pushing back against dominant, sometimes harmful narratives, but building something new and better in their place.��

“The artists I study refuse inherited ways of seeing and classifying people and identities; instead, they create spaces for different narratives, relationships and ways of belonging,” Ardizzoni says.��

That sense of possibility also aligns with Ardizzoni’s hopes for how Italian media will grow in the years ahead.��

“I hope we’ll move beyond thinking of diversity as a topic that surfaces only in moments of crisis or political debate,” she says. “The most interesting work being produced today (in scholarship as well as in the arts) is showing that race is a necessary lens through which we can better understand contemporary Italy.”

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