Marzia Milazzo is Associate Professor of English at the University of Johannesburg. Her research is broadly concerned with the relationship between the poetics and politics of both racist and antiracist discourses. Her research and teaching areas, in no particular order, include twentieth and twenty-first century African American, Afro-Latin American, Chicanx/Latinx, Inter-American, and South African literatures; Black radical thought, Critical Race Theory (CRT), and the history and sociology of racism. Prior to joining UJ, Milazzo was Assistant Professor of English at Vanderbilt University, USA, and an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Rhodes University, Makhanda.

Milazzo’s first book, Colorblind Tools: Global Technologies of Racial Power (Northwestern UP, Critical Insurgencies series, 2022), offers a transnational account of anti‑Blackness and white supremacy that pushes against the dominant emphasis on historical change that pervades current racial theory. Bringing together a capacious archive of texts on race produced in Brazil, Cuba, Mexico, Panama, the United States, and South Africa from across multiple disciplines and genres, Milazzo uncovers transnational continuities in structural racism and white supremacist discourse from the inception of colonial modernity to the present. In the process, she traces the global workings of what she calls colorblind tools: technologies and strategies that at once camouflage and reproduce white domination. Milazzo’s study proves that colorblindness is not new, nor is it a sub-type of racist ideology or a hallmark of our era. It is a constitutive technology of racism—a tool the master cannot do without.

You can read more about Colorblind Tools here

Currently, Milazzo is working on a book-length study on contemporary South African literature, tentatively titled Darkening Rainbow: Post-Apartheid Writing and the Politics of Race.