Lecture
ASCL Seminar: Waves of Memory in the Red Sea: Unpacking Mixedness through Italo-Eritrean Livescapes
- Date
- Thursday 6 March 2025
- Time
- Location
-
Herta Mohr
Witte Singel 27A
2311 BG Leiden - Room
- 0.31
This seminar explores the lives of multiracial people in the Red Sea region from the 1800s to the 2000s. The Red Sea connects Africa, the Middle East, the Mediterranean, and the Indian Ocean, making it a meeting point of different people and histories.
By involving communities in uncovering and reconstructing their histories of mixedness through collaborative research and citizen science, Professor Valentina Fusari highlights how the memories of Italo-Eritreans (Euro-Africans resulted by colonial encounters in the Horn of Africa during the 19th and 20th centuries) have been preserved and shared. She emphasizes the importance of combining oral histories with archival sources to trace how these memories have been transmitted through both formal records and informal storytelling. Professor Fusari examines the documented social lives and careers of Italo-Eritreans to uncover hidden stories from the past, challenge stereotypes about mixedness, and propose new ways of understanding the history of the region. By doing so, she offers alternative timelines and spatial perspectives on the Red Sea, a region shaped by ever-changing social and political transformations.
Through a bottom-up approach, this seminar offers new insights into the history of mixedness in the Red Sea, as Professor Fusari aims to challenge categories and stereotypes about mixedness, promoting inclusivity and encouraging a deeper more nuanced understanding of the past. By doing so, she raises awareness of the risks of oversimplifying or misrepresenting the history of mixed-ancestry people.
This event takes places in Leiden in person. For registrees who cannot travel to Leiden a link to an online platform will be sent one day before the start of the event.
About the speaker
Valentina Fusari graduated in Cultural Anthropology and Ethnology at the University of Siena (2006), holds a PhD in Geopolitics (University of Pisa, 2011), and attended the Collen Program on Fertility, Education, and the Environment (University of Oxford, 2014). From 2012 to 2014, she was assistant professor at the Adi Keih College of Arts and Social Sciences (Eritrea), followed by a position as postdoctoral researcher in History of Africa at the University of Pisa (Italy). Since 2022, Professor Fusari teaches History of Africa at the University of Turin (Italy). She has been visiting researcher at the An-Najah National University (Nablus, Palestine), the African Studies Centre (Leiden, The Netherlands), the University of West Bohemia (Pilsen, Repubblica Ceca), the Harvard African Studies Center (Cambridge, USA), the Institute of Ethiopian Studies (Addis Ababa, Ethiopia).
Her research is broadly rooted in social history, anthropology, population studies, and promoted an interdisciplinary perspective. Her research interests focus mainly on the social, labour, and demographic history of the Horn of Africa in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Her current research focuses on the female agency in the Horn of Africa; the mobility of children; and on mixedness in the Red Sea, with particular attention to Italo-Eritreans.
In 2021 she was a fellow researcher at the African Studies Centre in Leiden, where she investigated the recent drop in fertility rates in Eritrea (1991-2020), with particular attention to changes attributable to proxy determinants, including reproductive health, female education as well as mobility and the socio-political environment, which resulted in demographic behaviours that move away from tradition, altering the population’s structure and dynamics.