Leslie Gross-Wyrtzen

“Bordering Blackness” is an ethnography of the “EurAfrican border,” the transnational mobility regime that spans the Mediterranean, northern Africa, and much of the continent. Based on fieldwork conducted since 2016, the book analyzes the experiences of West and Central African migrants moving through or stuck in Moroccan cities to understand the space and subject-making capacity of borders beyond territory and citizenship. It draws on critical scholarship on the political economy of borders and Black geographies’ insights on the co-constitution of race and space to theorize the economic and racial logics that stabilize the border across various sites, and to historicize these logics in the longue durée of African captivity, commodification, and racial othering. “Bordering Blackness” relocates analysis of the border from the edges of territories and the spectacle of formal border enforcement to urban space and informal governance. In addition, it challenges critical theorizations of borders that privilege Eurocentric theories of sovereignty, citizenship, and resistance, turning instead to postcolonial and African scholarship to locate border projects in larger efforts to define and delimit the boundaries of the human.