Parvati Nair

The body politic of dissent: the paperless and the indignant

This article seeks to consider the recent popular protests by the indignant in light of an ongoing history of paperless immigration. By taking Spain as a case in point, I shall explore the emergence of a common ground of dispossession and discontent between citizens devoid of political and economic assurances and immigrants who are non-citizens. I shall analyse the ways in which, in both cases, the presence of bodies of the disenfranchised in public space and the physical occupation of the latter reinvents the public sphere through bodily performance. If the paperless were precursors of the indignant, then today they are joined by a substantial economic underclass of subjects deprived of the privileges of citizenship through the failures of the prevailing economic system. Interestingly, the latter have incorporated the formers struggle for rights and recognition into their claims for justice and socioeconomic reform. The means for achieving these ends have, in both cases, been through physical presence in public and especially urban spaces. In this way, the bodies of the disenfranchised weave their way through and against the mainstream, thereby ensuring that marginality remains not on geosocial peripheries but rather as a visible feature of the everyday run. The fundamentally non-violent nature both of recent protests and the non-violent movements of non-citizens coalesce to reinvent the public sphere in terms of a democratic praxis that is performative in its appropriation and refiguring of civic belonging.

PRACTICES OF MIGRATION VOICING RISK: Migration, transgression and relocation in Spanish/Moroccan raï

The recent emergence of raï music among Moroccan immigrants living in Spain marks a new moment in the history of the form. However, it was not altogether unexpected. Since its inception in the cities of Algeria around thirty years ago as a result of increased rural to urban population flows, raï has been a musical form arising from the experience of migration. As such, it opened a space for the articulation of displaced, uprooted North African identities and is marked by traces of difficult and disjunctured encounters with new forms of modernity. Raï, as it is currently being constructed in Barcelona, offers a discourse for immigrant Moroccans living in Spain with which to construct specific transnational and transcultural identities in their new socio-cultural and economic surroundings. This new strand of raï moves beyond lyrics of love to underline the unmistakeably physical risks attendant on illicit migration across the Straits of Gibraltar. It is this overt emphasis on physical risk that specifically distingishes Spanish/Moroccan raï. In recent years, risk as a defining feature of late modernity has been the subject of considerable theoretical exploration. In the light of such theorizations, this essay examines the first raï CD released in Spain, Chab Samir (Afro-Blue Records, 1999), from the perspective of its music and lyrics, and personal interviews with the lead singer, Samir, and other members of his band.

Memory in motion: ethnicity, hybridity and globalization in self-photographs of Moroccan immigrants in Spain

This article aims to problematize memory and migration within a larger socio-cultural context of globalization, taking as a case-study a set of photographs of events which have taken place in an immigrant workers’ organization in Spain. I argue that migrant experiences of transnational displacement can cause cultural memory as a process to be resignified in subaltern bids for empowerment in new contexts. The photograph, as a trace of memory, then, itself a migrant and multi-referential fragment, both reflects and obscures the hybridity and complex temporality of immigrant experience, resignifying cultural memory in terms of the present.

Model International Mobility Convention

People are as mobile as they ever were in our globalized world. Yet the movement of people across borders lacks global regulation, leaving many people unprotected in irregular and dire situations and some States concerned that their borders have become irrelevant. And international mobility—the movement of individuals across borders for any length of time as visitors, students, tourists, labor migrants, entrepreneurs, long-term residents, family members, asylum seekers, or refugees—has no common definition or legal framework. There does exist a well-established refugee regime based on the 1951 Refugee Convention and its 1967 Additional Protocol, both implemented by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). As the nature of conflict has changed in recent decades, however, this regime has shown strain and weakness. Today there are more than sixty-five million displaced persons in the world, a level not seen since World War II. Mixed flows of labor migrants and refugees fleeing for safety and economic prospects have created a crisis in the asylum-seeking process. Those forced to

Daniela Flesler, The Return of the Moor: Spanish Responses to Contemporary Moroccan Immigration (West Lafayette: Purdue University, 2008). 246 pp. ISBN 978-1-55753-483-5 Susan Martin-Márquez, Disorientations: Spanish Colonialism in Africa and the Performance of Identity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008). 445 pp. ISBN 978-0-300-12520-7

The year 2008 saw the publication of two studies in the English language on the cultural complexities of Spain’s relation to Africa: Daniela Flesler’s The Return of the Moor: Spanish Responses to Contemporary Moroccan Immigration and Susan Martin-Márquez’s Disorientations: Spanish Colonialism in Africa and the Performance of Identity. A starting point for both works is the question of Spanish identity in relation to its Moorish past, its long history of political interests in, and cultural intercourse with, North Africa. This is the historical canvas against which both books are set and one that leads in both cases to a consideration of the current phenomenon of migration from North Africa to Spain. Interestingly, though, the two books offer different perspectives on this matter. While Flesler argues that Spanish responses to the question of Africa find their most current expression in terms of a deep-seated anxiety towards, and repudiation of, immigrants from Morocco, Martin-Márquez hones in with impressive intellectual nuancing on the curious paradox whereby Spanish national identity is itself predicated in terms of a disturbing and restless colonial ambivalence vis-à-vis Africa. There is a dearth in Spanish cultural studies of scholarly works that both explore and theorize these issues. As such, both these books should be welcomed for working what is as yet relatively obscure and unexplored terrain in Spanish cultural studies. Flesler’s The Return of the Moor examines the position of Moroccan immigrants in light of Spain’s membership of the European Union. She argues that new racism, as constructed in Britain and other parts of Europe, has made its way to Spain and layers itself over anxieties that have their roots in the expulsion of the Moors following the Spanish Reconquest. Her analysis follows a logical line, working its way onwards from the first chapter, where she ‘‘sets the scene’’ by analysing Spain’s uneasy geocultural situation at the edge of Europe, whereby it is both a guardian of European borders and also part of Europe. The ghosts of medieval Moors pervade this book. In Flesler’s view, many contemporary cultural practices, celebrations and discourses take the shadow of the Moor as their cue. Equally, contemporary anxieties about the apparently unstoppable phenomenon of immigration become manageable when perceived through the lens of this historical filter that privileges diversity as a cultural feature of Spanish identity, whilst also demarcating clearly defined cultural spaces within which to host and contain alterity.

Autography From the Margins: Photography, Collective Self-Representation, and the Disturbance of History

This section is devoted to writing that does not fall within the strict defi nition of ‘research’ but that is, nevertheless, of special interest to researchers. It enables us to publish a wide variety of material on many aspects of hispanism: opinion, discussion, interviews, revaluations, arguments, anecdotes and memoirs, and impassioned calls to arms. It also offers us the opportunity of publishing our readers’ responses to them. Contributions are invited, and may be of any length from a paragraph to 7,000 words.