Threads of labour

Overview & Synopsis

This book explores the everyday lives of irregular migrants from Central and Western Africa ‘stuck’ in Morocco and navigating hostile politics of containment with abuse, suffering, and violence. It sheds light on young, male migrants’ own experiences and understandings of their entrapped mobility in two peripheral neighbourhoods of Rabat in Morocco. Departing from reductionist public discourses centred around the trope of crisis, this ethnographic study seeks to deepen, nuance, and humanise understandings of ‘sub-Saharan migration’. Based on long-standing ethnographic engagements with illegality and migration, the book foregrounds the emic notion of ‘l’aventure’ (the adventure) as an existential yearning for a better life and future, an individual quest for emancipation and opportunities amidst a collective endeavour that defies transnational efforts to govern people’s ability to settle and circulate. The adventure entails a mode of being in (and moving through) the world for migrants facing violent, racialised migration regimes marked by abjection and inequities. To explore migrants’ fraught but hopeful journeys, the book examines how adventurers cultivate fragile but necessary dispositions, skills, and relationships to navigate deadly bordering measures stretching across and beyond the Mediterranean region. Steering away from ubiquitous aesthetics of despair, victimhood, and criminality, the book focuses on young men’s efforts to challenge bordering practices to retain control over their lives and mobility. Relevant beyond the Moroccan context, this book’s theorisation of the adventure provides analytical insights to analyse violent migration regimes which target illegalised and racialised migrants.