Externalizing otherness: The racialization of belonging in the Morocco-EU Border

Abstract

This essay analyzes how race politics and immigration politics intersect in present-day Morocco, entangling various actors across multiple scales, from the continental to the interpersonal. While often problematic, we suggest that externalization can provide a lens through which to trace the production and circulation of race in the Morocco-EU borderlands and to chart the uneasy proximities that emerge among states, migrants and “civil society,” and racialized outsiders and insiders. And while numerous studies analyze the geopolitical and economic dimensions of the externalized border, how externalization reworks racial-social categories of belonging in “partner” or “third” states like Morocco is less known. Drawing on ethnography and interviews, we argue that externalization is a useful analytical category for understanding transnational border projects as racial projects that operate beyond the domain of citizenship or the state, reworking categories of belonging and exclusion from the scale of the body to the global scale. The Morocco-EU borderlands constitute a “contact zone” where multiple peoples, institutions, processes, and histories interact to produce blackness as out-of-place, changing the way that Moroccans understand race, place, and membership. The mobilization of race in the Morocco-EU border impacts the lives and movements of West and Central African migrants, but may also compound the exclusions of racialized Moroccans at home and in Europe.