African Venice

Books /Fondamenta /African Venice

Paul Kaplan

Shaul Bassi

Igiaba Scego

Maaza Mengiste

African Venice

African Venice is the first guidebook to the extensive historical and contemporary African presence in the City of the Lagoons. A set of ten walking tours highlight images of Black people in Venetian art from the Middle Ages to the present, the afterlife of Shakespeare’s Othello, the painful local legacies of slavery and Italian colonialism, as well as the remarkable visibility of African and Afro-descendant artists artists at the Venice Biennale. These tours are enriched by more than twenty essays, poems and reflections, which celebrate, question and reimagine Venice’s Black past and present. From medieval and Renaissance paintings and sculpture to contemporary artworks, from early modern documents to postcolonial voices, African Venice will show you the city as you have never seen it.

Preface: Igiaba Scego.
Afterwords: Maaza Mengiste.
Published in 2024.

Acquista

Press review

Biographical notes

Paul Kaplan is professor of art history at Purchase College, SUNY.

Author of The Rise of the Black Magus in Western Art (1985) and a major contributor to The Image of the Black in Western Art series at Harvard University Press (2010-2012), he was a Project Scholar for Speak of Me as I Am by Fred Wilson, an installation from the American Pavilion of the 2003 Venice Biennale.

Shaul Bassi è professore di letteratura inglese all’Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia.
Le sue pubblicazioni includono Shakespeare in Venice. Luoghi, personaggi e incanti di una città che va in scena (con Alberto Toso Fei, 2007), Turbo Road. Il Kenya, i suoi scrittori, un bambino (2023) e Venezia e l’Antropocene (co-curatela, wetlands 2022). È co-fondatore del festival letterario internazionale Incroci di civiltà.

Born in Rome in 1974 to Somali parents, Igiaba Scego obtained a doctorate in Pedagogy and now works in journalism, writing and research.

Her story Salsicce won the Eks&tra prize in 2003 and was then published in Pecore nere (Rome-Bari, Laterza, 2005).
With Ingy Mubiayi she edited the interviews with young children of immigrants entitled When you are born it's a roulette (Milan, Terre di mezzo, 2007) and with Rino Bianchi the volume Roma negata (Rome, Ediesse, 2014).
Among her other publications: Rhoda (Rome, Sinnos, 2004), Oltre Babilonia (Rome, Donzelli, 2008), Adua (Florence, Giunti, 2015).

For wetlands she wrote the preface to Venezia Africana and African Venice (2024).

Nata a Addis Abeba e residente a New York, Maaza Mengiste è Fulbright Scholar e docente di scrittura al Queens College.

Nel 2007 è stata nominata New Literary Idol dal New York Magazine e nel 2020 ha ricevuto un Award in letteratura dall'American Academy of Arts and Letters.

È l'autrice di Lo sguardo del leone (Neri Pozza, 2010) e Il re ombra (Einaudi, 2021 e 2024), che ha vinto il Premio The Bridge 2019 per la Narrativa, è stato finalista al Booker Prize 2020 ed è stato selezionato fra i migliori libri dell'anno da The New York Times, Npr, Elle e Time.

Per wetlands cura la collana afterwords e ha scritto la postfazione di Venezia Africana e African Venice.

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