Acknowledgements

This book is the product of a long journey that, luckily, I did not have to take alone. Mentors, colleagues, friends, and family members walked with me as I wrote these pages between Italy, the United Kingdom, the Sultanate of Oman and Spain. I have drawn on the knowledge, support, and kindness of so many over these past years, and I owe a huge debt of gratitude to all of them. Yet, any shortcomings remain my responsibility alone.

It is no exaggeration to say that this book would have never happened without the help and encouragement of Ruth Breeze, my selfless, hard-working, and energetic mentor at the University of Navarra. Not only has she pushed me to take my manuscript out of the drawer, but she has been unflinchingly generous in her counsel, inspiring and supporting me at every step.

I am indebted to Johnny Unger, for his patient readings of the roughest drafts of this work and the unyielding academic support he gave me during my year as visiting PhD student at Lancaster University.

I thank Anton Allahar for the inspirational insights he shared with me on politics, ethnicity and democracy in Trinidad and Tobago, and for reassuring me that “there is nothing like an ‘impostor syndrome’ when it comes to committed scholarship”.

I want to express my gratitude to my colleague and friend Majid KhosraviNik for unfailingly believing in my research and for encouraging me to be, always and unapologetically, critical.

Heartfelt thanks go to Carolina Pérez-Arredondo for her endless, sisterly support. Together with John Heywood and Kristof Savski she has been the best housemate and friend that I could ever hope for, lightening the load of doctoral research with scrumptious food and comic relief.

I am grateful to my colleagues and friends Giuseppe Balirano, Antonio Fruttaldo and Antonio Compagnone for constructive comments and well-needed distractions over countless espressos and pizza slices in the busy street cafes of our beloved Napoli.

I thank my colleague and friend Francesco L. Sinatora, who persuaded me that my COVID-19-induced lockdown in Newcastle upon Tyne was actually the best time to write this up, or fare i pani, as he likes to say in a baking metaphor.

I thank my friends and colleagues in the Sultanate of Oman, where I lectured at Sultan Qaboos University. Angioletta Ciuffreda, Taz Al Shaibani, Mounira Hejaiej, Mickael Joseph, Marco Schifano, Abdul Gabbar Al-Sharafi are only some of the many people who touched my heart in the two beautiful and dense years I spent in Muscat.

I thank the #GDM for our twenty years of friendship. For always being on the other side of the phone across the global time zones. For defusing everything. For helping me to stay grounded and being there to share the best and worst moments of each other’s lives.

I am grateful to my dearest friend Eduardo Valles Galmes. For believing in me so much that I started to believe in myself too. For sharing a safe space for the most brutally honest conversations. For holding my heart when I needed it the most.

But, above all, I am deeply and eternally grateful to my father Michele and my mother Fiorella.

This book exists because my parents gifted me with the warmth of a home where I could grow at my own pace, where there was always dinner on the table, vinyls to play and a drawer to ‘steal’ a few coins for ice-creams and magazines from.

This book exists because my parents encouraged me to dream big and aim high. I was the first member of my whole extended family to get a university degree, let alone a PhD. This also meant I elbowed my way through my university years, since being a Professoressa was a suitable job for the girls from the good neighbourhoods, the ones where you can see the Gulf of Napoli from your living room window.

This book exists because of the long afternoons I spent in my childhood room, with my mother helping me with my school homework. She instilled in me her patience and humility in learning, her strong sense of determination and duty, her commitment to growth. As my studies progressed, she would keep me company in my room anyway, brewing coffee and staying up late in solidarity while I read. My success, her ornament.

My mother Fiorella grew up in a working-class neighbourhood in the outskirts of Napoli, in a small house dominated by a massive asbestos factory. From the shy and stuttering youngest child of an unsupportive family, she blossomed into one of the strongest, most generous, life-affirming and wholehearted women that I have ever met. As we travelled, laughed, and grew up together, my mother taught me everything I needed to know in life.

She taught me about feminism as a practice to live by, persuading me that few things are more urgent in a woman’s life than getting a sound education, a driving license, a good job, and a credit card with her name on it. She taught me about resilience in the face of the deepest darkness, as she battled with poise an incurable, asbestos-induced lung cancer that took her breath away too soon. She taught me about loving beyond measure, and it is to her ever-present and ever-bright memory that this book is dedicated.