Introduzione: saperi e pratiche decoloniali

Introduction: Decolonial Knowledge and Practices. How do Italian public universities tackle past and current racism in Italy? A significant amount of academic research has been dedicated to Italian racism in the last few decades, yet the topic is still largely silenced in public debate and excluded from academic core-curriculum. More broadly, how do public institutions of higher education in Italy deal with the global decolonizing wave and with major demographic changes? How do they face the political and cultural demands of racialized groups and anti-racist movements to transform theoretical and methodological approaches, curricula and canons, or to ‘break’ teaching staff’s predominant whiteness? The seminars organized in the Universities of Macerata and Modena and Reggio Emilia (in 2021-22 and 2022-23) introduced topics relating to racism, anti-racism, sexism, anti-sexism and decoloniality into the credit system, interrogating them with independent scholars, activists, school and university teachers and students. FES 12 MONOGRAPHIC ISSUE publishes some of the seminars’ presentations and three additional contributions which investigate the Fascist and post-Fascist anti-Gypsyism of Guido Landra; biopolitics of race, gender and citizenship in the recent Italian political ‘progressive’ discourse; the anti-racist potential of domestic reception and co-housing between white Italians and refugees; the ‘fabrication’ of Gypsies through segregationist policies against Roma in Italy; the imbrication and reproduction of racist and sexist violence in Macerata’s terroristic attack (2018) through Luca Traini’s performance of Italian whiteness (2018); the transversal spread of Great replacement theories in Italy and their operative intertwining of racism and sexism; the gap between anti-racist and decolonial projects and the real democratization of the university; the death of Alika Ogorchukwu (2022) as a result of both racist and ableist violence against a Black, disabled body.