Melanie Masterton Sherazi

“Black Mediterranean Aesthetics” situates Rome in the 1950s and early 1960s as a significant hub for Black American and Italian modernist artistic innovation and collaboration. The project draws on archives in Italy and oral histories with artists to expand the critical conversation about Black exilic culture beyond more familiar scenes, like Paris. Black American writers and artists in Rome infused critical distance and abstracted political content into their experimental aesthetics in and across genres and media forms—including fiction, cinema, performance, visual art, translation, life writing, and journalism. Their lives and art activated heterogenous ways of being in the world, inspired by Rome’s multi-layered artistic environment and by their respective work and travel in the Mediterranean amid decolonization movements. The collective presence in Rome of Black American writers and artists and their respective collaborations with Italian artists and filmmakers modeled cultural processes of desegregation and defascistization that circulated through transnational print, performance, and media cultures. The project positions the Eternal City as a dynamic site for postwar avant-garde visions, widening the range and temporalities of Black modernist cultural production.