Bordering Blackness (Migration and Dispossession in the Afro-Mediterranean)

Bordering Blackness is an ethnography of the EurAfrican border told through the experiences of African migrants as they travel through the Sahara Desert into Morocco and across the Mediterranean Sea. Leslie Gross-Wyrtzen sheds light on the racial and economic logics that organize the transnational border regime across various sites and actors, historicizing them within the longue durée of African captivity, commodification, and racial othering. In contrast to Euro-American theories of blackness originating in the Middle Passage and western Atlantic slavery, she traces how West and Central Africans become black through present-day desert and maritime passages, which are entangled in earlier pathways across Atlantic and Mediterranean worlds. By historicizing and spatializing blackness, Gross-Wyrtzen forwards a relational understanding of contemporary borders, not as manifestations of an unchanging colonial or racial past but as contingent, if durable, ensembles ripe for reworking and resistance.