Abstract

Drawing on research in Morocco and the North African diaspora in France, the paper explores various ways in which globality is lived in the Maghreb and beyond. It re-examines tropes of “crossroads”, “borderlands”, and “frontiers” that have been variously proposed to encapsulate the Maghreb’s connectivity to the Mashreq, Europe, and sub-Saharan Africa, tracing the ways these categories have alternately privileged and erased the region’s particular socioeconomic and cultural complexity. By focusing on how various North African subjects (Berbers, “Beurs,” harraga, etc.) have cognitively mapped and performatively realized their global positioning, the paper models a shift in ethnographic area studies focus to mobility rather than identity, to the histories of exchange of people, goods, and ideas across repeatedly shifting borders.

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