This talk is part of the event series Hopeful Encounters, Violent Collisions, which explores the connections of intimacy, violence, cultural creativity, and political struggle that link together the African and Italian diasporas–from the in­fluence of African American musical traditions on Italian American singers, to the influence of Black diasporic resources on contemporary Afro-Italian struggles for recognition, to the mobilizations of Eritreans in the United States and Italy to un­earth hidden histories of Italian colonialism.