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" Bordering Blackness: "
Gross-Wyrtzen, Leslie
Martin, Deborah
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Latin Dissertation
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| Language of Document
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English
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| Record Number
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1106133
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| Doc. No
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TLpq2376293487
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| Main Entry
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Gross-Wyrtzen, Leslie
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Martin, Deborah
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| Title & Author
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Bordering Blackness:\ Gross-Wyrtzen, LeslieMartin, Deborah
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| College
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Clark University
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| Date
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2020
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| student score
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2020
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| Degree
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Ph.D.
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| Page No
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198
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| Abstract
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This dissertation interrogates the geopolitics and geo-economics of race in border projects between Africa and Europe. Taking the Morocco-EU border regime as the central object of inquiry, this multi-sited, qualitative study demonstrates how bordering works (and where it fails) to contain West and Central African migrants away from Europe’s edges. As an ethnography of the border, I observed migrants’ encounters with it on the move, at frontiers and fences, and in Moroccan urban space to answer three questions: First, what actors, spaces, and practices make up the border? Second, what does knowledge of the border’s constitution indicate about its underlying logics? And finally, how do the border’s operations constrain or enable migrants’ ability to transgress it? Three findings emerged to characterize the Morocco-EU border as a project of political economy and racialized exclusion. First, border governance regulating migrants’ movements from Africa to Europe is driven by and organized according to market rationalities that enroll state and non-state actors in the facilitation and control of migrants’ mobilities. Second, the process of bordering mobilizes white European racial imaginaries and local, historically-sedimented racial categories to contain and extract value from “black” or “African” migrants moving through Moroccan social space. This racialized containment oscillates between the fast violence of militarized migratory routes and the slow violence of abandonment in urban informal spaces. Finally, migrants themselves draw upon these newly inscribed black identities and spatialities to form transnational communities, grounded in place, that enable their survival, mobility, and self-recuperation in violent borderscapes. This study challenges critical theorizations of borders the privilege European political theories of sovereignty, citizenship, and resistance, instead turning to postcolonial theory and Black geographic scholarship to situate border projects as part of larger efforts to define and delimit the boundaries of the human. In short, this dissertation transcends the dominant regional perspective of North Africa as analytically separate from either the broader African continent or the Euro-African Mediterranean region; forcefully makes the case for considering race and racialization in geopolitical analyses; and demonstrates the centrality of questions about immigration and border enforcement to more fundamental discussions about belonging and personhood in the modern world.
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| Subject
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African studies
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Cultural anthropology
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Geography
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