From the Margins as Method: Notes on Making Political Culture from the Inside Knowledge Production From Personally Lived Experiences

Abstract

This article takes the margin not as a condition to overcome, but as a method. Written from the position of a domestic worker and cultural producer in Milan, it traces how communities most affected by racialisation and structural exclusion in Italy are already producing sophisticated political and cultural analysis, largely without institutional recognition. Through two interconnected projects—Blackcoffee_pdc, a podcast conceived as a diasporic counter-archive, and Blackn[è]ss Fest, a free annual festival functioning as a collective laboratory for anti-racist and afrofeminist politics—the article argues that the intimate knowledge produced from sites of structural invisibility constitutes theory in itself, not merely lived experience awaiting academic elaboration. Drawing on Federici, Vergès, hooks, Fanon, and Freire, it proposes a distinction that runs throughout: making community through politics, not politics through community. The margin, here, is not a platform from which to appeal to the centre. It is a site of construction.