Venezia africana

Books /Fondamenta /Venezia africana

Paul Kaplan

Shaul Bassi

Maaza Mengiste

Igiaba Scego

Venezia africana

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.

Year of publication: 2024
Language: Italian

€22,00

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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 is a professor of English literature at Ca' Foscari University in Venice.
His publications include Shakespeare in Venice. Places, characters, and charms of a city that takes the stage (with Alberto Toso Fei, 2007), Turbo Road. Kenya, its writers, a child (2023) and Venice and the Anthropocene (co-edited, wetlands 2022). He is co-founder of the international literary festival Incroci di civiltà.

Born in Addis Ababa and living in New York, Maaza Mengiste is a Fulbright Scholar and professor of writing at Queens College. In 2007, she was named New Literary Idol by New York Magazine and in 2020 she received an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

She is the author of The Lion's Gaze (Neri Pozza, 2010) and The Shadow King (Einaudi, 2021 and 2024), which won the 2019 The Bridge Prize for Fiction, was a finalist for the 2020 Booker Prize, and was selected as one of the best books of the year by The New York Times, NPR, Elle, and Time.

For wetlands, he edits the afterwords series and wrote the afterword for Venezia Africana and African Venice.

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).

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