Renewed purpose and perspectives. Reflections on the Black Europe Summer School (Amsterdam, 22 June – 4 July 2025)

By Alice Flinta

In June this year, EUTERPE doctoral candidate Alice Flinta participated in the seventeenth annual Black Europe Summer School – Interrogating Citizenship, Race and Ethnic Relations. The organisers, Prof. Kwame Nimako, Dr Camilla Hawthorne (University of California, Santa Cruz) and Prof. Stephen Small (University of California, Berkeley), brought us together – an enthusiastic cohort of around thirty-five students from various backgrounds – for two weeks, at IIRE, the International Institute for Research and Education in Amsterdam.

BESS is a hub for intellectual, political, and social interrogation over race relations in Europe. This year it opened with an introductory talk by Prof. Nimako delineating a concise history of the coming together of the European Union. The lecture focused on which social and political stakeholders have been involved in the process, and which ones haven’t. Such an approach underscored the analysis of the EU’s power structure, its economic interests and social priorities. It shed light on the emergence of racist, nativist views that are reflected in current systems of “racial citizenship” and are fundamental to the notion of Fortress Europe.[PB1] 

The second day, we started by taking a tour of four European port cities and their relationships with Blackness, intellectually guided by Prof. Olivette Otele (SOAS), whose copies of African-Europeans: An Untold Story (London: Hurst & Company, 2020) were resting on most desks that day. From day three, we started to zoom into the different national realities, and approached race and race relations on a country-by-country basis. We started with Dr Margaret Amaka Ohia-Nowak (Marie Curie-Sklodowska University, Lublin) guiding us though “Black Poland,” to then move onto “Black Germany” with Dr Madeline Bass (Max Planck Institute, Göttingen), “Black Britain” with Prof. Stephen Small, “Black Italia” with Dr Camilla Hawthorne, and “Black Portugal” with Dr Cristina Roldão (University Institute of Lisbon). In one of our last seminars, Dr Giovanni Picker (University of Glasgow) prompted us to move beyond the framework of the nation-state and adopt a transnational and transhistorical lens to assess the potentialities of juxtaposing Black European and Critical Romani Studies.[PB2] Participants had the chance to present their research, projects and ideas at the day-long Inside Black Europe and African Diaspora Symposium that took place on Friday, 27 June. The symposium was organised around four panels, the topics of which ranged from literature to sociological, ethnographic and methodological research, and a preview screening of a documentary on Afrori Books – Books by Black Authors bookshop in Brighton (UK). Inspired by Dr Hawthorne’s “Black Italia”, I gave a presentation on how Afroitalian literature draws on the Mediterranean (as a relational space, but also as a philosophical framework) to disrupt and challenge racial affiliations in Europe.

Fundamental to BESS is experiencing and engaging with legacies, memories and responses to Europe’s colonial past. For this purpose, the participation of the School’s cultural attaché, Jennifer Tosch, founder of Amsterdam’s Black Heritage Tours, was invaluable. From a boat tour of Amsterdam’s colonial past to a visit to Kehinde Wiley’s exhibition at the Van Loon Museum, from a guided excursion of the Royal Palace to a preview talk and walk on the site of the forthcoming National Slavery Museum, to the unforgettable Keti Koti Day on 1^st July, Tosch brought to life many of the discussions that took place throughout the two weeks of workshops. Finally, the tour of the Wereldmuseum’s exhibition Our Colonial Inheritance and the lecture by Wayne Modest were crucial to spark conversations on the management and remembrance of colonial legacies and their future.

BESS is a fundamental experience not only for those who think, write and feel with and through questions of race and Blackness in Europe, but also for those who think, write and feel through Europe. As the many workshops, talks, lectures and presentations have made clear, Blackness has been, and regretfully remains, a marginal question within the European project – be it intellectual, social or political. Black Europe is not just an educational programme, but also a social and political mission that leaves us, participants, with both an invaluable range of tools and frameworks to make our work more careful, caring and attuned to reality, and a renewed sense of engagement and purpose.