‘There is no race here’: on blackness, slavery, and disavowal in North Africa and North African studies

Pursuing Opacity: Geographies of Visibility in the Western Mediterranean

“…14 For more on the intersections of space and race in Fanon's work, see Conroy (2023). 15 For a wonderful discussion of racial formations in North Africa, and their location at the conjuncture of several difference-producing trajectories, see Gross-Wyrtzen (2023). For an eye-opening illustration of how Morocco's S adi (1554-1659) dynasty shaped the emergence of racialised forms of slavery in the Atlantic, see Errazzouki (2023).…”

Looking into the border. Whiteness, (un)desirable encounters and research containment at the Spanish–Moroccan border

“…In Morocco, Blackness has long been conflated with inferiority and out-of-placeness. As Gross-Wyrtzen argues, such association is already present in early Islamic thought, but consolidated with the expansion of the Arabic empire (Gross-Wyrtzen 2022). The development of the trans-Saharan trade, which was responsible for the provision of enslaved people from the Bilad al-Sudan to the Mediterranean region, and its later intertwining with the trans-Atlantic slave trade, firmly established race ‘as a marker of otherness that justified enslavement’ (Errazzouki 2021, 4).…”

“…Morocco played a chief role in such a process: the country, in fact, was a departure point for ships bringing slaves to the Americas, and also exported goods produced through a domestic plantation economy fuelled by enslaved labour (Errazzouki 2021). The pillars of Morocco's positioning on the global colour line had emerged, and kept on being re-asserted over the following centuries through policies of mandatory conscription that considered dark-skinned people re-enslavable (El Hamel 2012), and land distribution arrangements that disenfranchised enslaved people (Gross-Wyrtzen 2022; see Becker 2002). In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the build-up to, and then the formal establishment of, colonial rule cemented the conflation of whiteness with ‘superiority, power, and beauty’ (Hannoum 2019, 16), thus unquestionably sanctioning light skin as a marker of desirability.…”

“…Whether I had gone to places for research purposes or simply for leisure did not really matter. Nothing in our encounter was due to chance: I had arrived at that house party, at that cinema, at that café, because my white body was oriented by the same inherited history that oriented other white bodies – a history of privilege created through (neo)colonial dynamics that durably structure Moroccan society (Gross-Wyrtzen 2022; El Hamel 2012). The élite lifestyle NGO workers and I automatically had access to was very much linked to the inflated privilege that the post-colonial border granted to Global North passport holders.…”

“…My appearance guided her in making assumptions about who I was, why I was there, whether I was welcome or not. In a post-colonial context where light skin is a racial marker for desirability, privilege and belonging (Gross-Wyrtzen 2022), my whiteness acted as a ‘credential’ (Williams 2020, 156): I surely was there because I had been shortlisted for the social worker position – even if I did not have a social work diploma; only because I was the only white person waiting amongst dark-skinned people. Even though I had just arrived to the drop-in centre, history had preceded me, and had shaped the conditions according to which Laila perceived me in the first place (Hannoum 2019).…”