Lauren Wagner

Feeling at home in public: diasporic Moroccan women negotiating leisure in Morocco and the Netherlands.

Muslim women are often cited as subject to restriction in their mobility through public space, especially in European contexts, in comparison with non-Muslim community members. Yet any woman might face restriction in her access to leisure outside the home through geographies of risk and fear, as well as geographies of care and responsibility. In this article, we describe the ways in which Moroccan Muslim women resident in Europe negotiate access to leisure outside the home, in both Europe and Morocco, demonstrating that they practice mobilities framed by safety, risk and responsibility combined with individual volition to be participants in public spaces. Using examples from interviews and ethnographic fieldwork, we discuss a notion of ‘viscosity’ as safe public space that acts as an extension of the home, where women feel comfortable enacting their daily lives and engaging in leisure practices. By comparing data from the Netherlands and Morocco, we highlight the role of Muslim-dominant and Christian-dominant public spheres in these negotiations of leisure. The ways women inhabit such spaces reflect individual concerns about personal safety, as well as maintaining respectful relations with family and being protected from unknown dangers, in ways that reflect not only religious beliefs but also geographies of risk related to other factors. Inhabiting such spaces implicates how they become part of the community at large, as visibly present participants, by negotiating many factors beyond religious beliefs as part of their access to public leisure spaces.

Trouble at home: diasporic second homes as leisure space across generations.

Like migrants from various southern sending countries, many Moroccan post-war guest worker migrants in Belgium and the Netherlands invested part of their foreign earnings in building a house in Morocco. These houses were often earmarked for eventual retirement, but over the course of years of return visits became the familial vacation home in their place of origin. Their cyclical presence enabled ongoing communion with family in Morocco, while also often exacerbating economic inequalities among family members resulting from migration. As post-migrant generations of Moroccans from Europe are now purchasing homes in Morocco, their choices indicate how diasporic property ownership over progressive generations may tend more towards leisure-oriented second homes rather than the stereotypical image of migrant investment in place-attached ‘hometown’ houses.

Chapter 4 Negotiating Marrakech: Postcolonial Travels in Morocco

Marrakech is today the most important tourist destination in Morocco. Marrakech, however, is not only a key reference point for mass international tourism, but also the preferred choice for those hunting for an “authentic” experience in this North African country. The “Red City” is indeed often presented in literature and advertising alike as a place out of modern time where the real “soul” of Morocco can be found and unveiled (Minca, 2006). This chapter investigates how this “soul” was established—and is now, in Marrakech, constantly reenacted—through layers of colonial and postcolonial interactions between Europe and Morocco.

Topographies of the Kasbah Route: Hardening of a heritage trail

In 1932, the Tourism Syndicate of the French Protectorate government in Morocco published a guidebook for French tourists to follow the ‘Route des Kasbas’ through southern Morocco. The trajectory described is still in many ways reproduced by contemporary guiding materials, delineating specific routes where this ‘heritage’ might be found in Morocco and what sorts of mobilities are necessary to seek it. Using these guiding resources from ‘the field’, along with our own ethnographic experiences as travelling researchers, we trace how colonial cartographical rationalities structured in this region along its ‘road’, through promotion by the French Protectorate government as a mobile site for tourism, and how that infrastructural and economic sedimentation persists in contemporary mobilities through it – including our own mobilities as tourism researchers. We question when and how it might be possible to escape this cartographic specificity for other spatialities of this road.

Viscous automobilities: diasporic practices and vehicular assemblages of visiting ‘home’

Abstract This paper analyzes how leisure practices of diasporic visitors cut viscous trails of car-based consumption through Morocco. During ethnography of summer holidays with Moroccan-origin visitors from Europe, research participants were often observed consuming elite leisure spaces in ways that were predicated on both their familiarity with Morocco as a homeland and their access to a car. Microanalysis of emergent dynamics of group distinction and cohesion achieved through car-propelled leisure consumption indicates how these visitors may be intentionally avoiding certain kinds of publics, which may unintentionally accumulate towards deeper economic divisions between themselves and a broader Moroccan consuming public.

Flirting diasporically: visits ‘home’ facilitating diasporic encounters and complex communities

ABSTRACT While generations of Moroccan-origin Europeans have been a focus of policymakers seeking to ‘integrate’ them in their countries of dwelling, less attention has been paid to how visiting ‘home’ in Morocco – a perpetuating practice among Moroccan families living in Europe – contributes to their life course trajectories. The summertime influx of Moroccan-origin families from across the globe creates the possibility to encounter a superdiverse community of Moroccans-from-elsewhere when visiting Morocco, many of whom share experiences of individual and collective ‘integration’ in their countries of dwelling, but diverge in their geographical and linguistic lived categorisations. This paper examines one formative type of integrative event that happens on summer holidays: flirtation. Differences in languages, European regional or national affiliations, or Moroccan ethnic and regional attachments all play roles in facilitating or hindering flirtatious encounters between diasporic Moroccans during the summer holidays. The resulting relationships (or lack thereof) demonstrate how diasporic superdiversity contributes to life course trajectories a process of social ordering and categorisation, simultaneously influencing configurations of diversity across Morocco and Europe.

Rabat retrospective: Colonial heritage in a Moroccan urban laboratory

Louis H-G Lyautey’s legacy as colonial regent of Morocco and as an innovator in French urban planning resonates through his transformation of Rabat according to entirely new spatial logics of modernity. While his plans produced conditions for structural difficulty in indigenous housing, they also enabled the preservation of historic monuments as spaces for tourist consumption – that are now, post-Independence, considered part of Moroccan national history. The grand colonial vision of Lyautey is in many ways perpetuated in contemporary developments of the region, in particular through the current Bouregreg Valley project that will dramatically redesign the landscape of the capital in the next few years. While the project involves massive neoliberal flows of global capital, its goals reflect much of Lyautey’s lasting influence on mapping heritage and Moroccan modernity, and the path of the European tourist through the Moroccan landscape.

Extra-ordinary Tangier: Domesticating Practices in a Border Zone

In this article, we take to task the representation of Tangier as an exceptional, extra-ordinary city, not bound by the usual laws of time and space—a representation conjured up by its literary expats in the early 1950s and still persistent today. We attempt to confront it with a different set of geographical imaginations of what we term, in shorthand, a domesticated more-than-ordinary city. In today’s Tangier, notions of exceptionality continue to dominate both touristic and artistic and literary imaginaries, as well as institutional narratives seeking to promote the city as an open space for trade and economic opportunity. We counter such accounts with a set of other geographical imaginations of Tangier, in literary and biographical accounts and artistic practice, a kaleidoscopic view on the city that refracts and reflects vantage and practice points of Tangier as both more than and extremely ordinary. Although Tangier is in many ways a unique case and setting, the points we try to raise here hold valence in other contexts, and we believe can help illuminate some continuing (post)colonial representational habits, cultural as well as geopolitical.

Language Contact and Language Conflict in Arabic: Variations on Sociolinguistic Theme

Language Contact and Language Conflict in Arabic: Variations on Sociolinguistic Theme By Aleya Rouchdy. ed. London. RoutledgeCurzon. 2002.