Abstract
Mobility is everywhere. Through mobility and its discursive structures, people on the move are engaged in disjuncture and recompositions of the definition of the self in its social, cultural, political, and moral ambits. Mobility has created a transnational space that challenges ideas and ideals ‘we’ hold about nation-state and its borders. In fact, it allows migrants to map personal geographies and exist in a ‘liminal space’ of their own construction. As such, migration is the condition of memory. Seen through the prism of mobility, self and memory are always in constant state of becoming, and what they become is but a construct. To attend to these dynamic shifts, this paper shall zoom in on M’barek Rabi’s (2018) novel Gharb al-mutawassiṭ (Western Mediterranean). The novel delves deeply into sub-Saharan literary shift, reflecting on Morocco both as a ‘transit zone’ and destination of migrants. It emphasizes that the ubiquitous presence of sub-Saharan African migrants and the discursive practices around their presence highlight the intricate ways in which the collective past is discursively etched on bodies and topographies of Moroccans. As such, this paper looks at mobility as performative production that generates personal and literary narratives that participate in articulating border-crossing interactions and bearing witness to the historical experience. In short, it underlines that the past, individual and/or collective, is not mere remembrance of an event; instead, it survives, lives on, and is mediated through the subject positions of both migrants and locals.
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
Migration, Memory, Mobility, Self, Identity, Transnational, Border-crossing
