Over the past two decades, the Europe Union has enlisted neighboring countries to contain “undesirable migrants” beyond European territory, effectively creating an “externalized border.” An early partner in the EU’s project of bordering, Morocco leverages its cooperation in exchange for economic and geopolitical advantages, as well as the opportunity to distinguish its own emigrant population from “less desirable” migrants further south. Based on ethnographic research among West and Central African migrants in Morocco since 2016, this talk analyzes how the transnational EurAfrican border works to contain migrant people beyond European territory and how race is central to its operations at multiple scales. Bringing postcolonial and Black geographies into conversation with critical border studies, I argue that the EurAfrican border is a world-making project, one that produces spaces and subjects of belonging and exclusion through racial regimes of im/mobility and violent expropriations. Black migrants’ racial displacement from dominant geographies enables the growth of the border’s economy of dispossession and give rise to insurgent African diasporas and spatial imaginaries that reassemble the border as a fugitive political geography. Attending to the experiences of migrants en/countering the border en route or stuck in place recuperates the Global South-ness of the Black Mediterranean, decentering Euro- or Americentric accounts of race, politics, and belonging.
Speaker
Dr. Leslie Gross-Wyrtzen (Anthropology and Ethnicity, Race, and Migration, Yale University)
Dr. Leslie Gross-Wyrtzen is a Lecturer in African Studies and Middle East Studies and faculty affiliate in Anthropology, Yale University.
Enquiry: anthropology@cuhk.edu.hk
