Rethinking the Race–Nation Nexus: Spatial Narratives of Racialised Italians in the United Kingdom

ABSTRACT Nation and race are often theorised as closely intertwined, with nationalism frequently positioned as a driving force behind racism. The article advances an empirically grounded argument that challenges this assumed relationship. In particular, it explores how space, understood as a socially constructed category, is discursively mobilised in everyday conversations and interactions to articulate notions of nation and national belonging beyond race. Drawing on 32 individual interviews with racialised Italians living in the United Kingdom, the article shows how, outside Italy—a space regarded as saturated with whiteness—participants feel empowered to reclaim the nation from which they were excluded and to embrace alternative readings of nation which de‐centre whiteness. These narratives reconfigure nation and national belonging not through opposition to racialised bodies (‘ who ’), but through proximity to or distance from particular practices, objects and im/material spaces (‘ what ’). The findings demonstrate that the race–nation nexus should not be conceptualised as an inevitable or intrinsic condition, but as a historical configuration rooted in a white fantasy of spatial hegemony which, while still powerful, is increasingly unsettled by the lived realities of growing racial diversity.