The Outside
Migration As Life in Morocco

Alice Elliot (Author)

9780253054739

Hardback, published 6 April 2021

204 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.5 cm, 0.431 kg

The Outside is a rich, deep, and nuanced ethnographic account of the transformations that migration generates in sending communities in the Tadla plain in central Morocco.

What does migration look like from the inside out? In The Outside, Alice Elliot decenters conventional approaches to migration by focusing on places of departure rather than arrival and rethinks migration from the perspective of those who have not (yet) left. Through an intimate ethnography of towns and villages notorious in Morocco for their striking emigration to "the outside," Elliot traces the powerful ways migration permeates life: as brutal bureaucratic machinery administering hope and despair, as intimate force crisscrossing kinship relations and bonds of love and care, as imaginative horizon of the self and of the future. Challenging dominant understandings of migration and their deadly consequences by centering non-migrants' sharp theorizations and intimate experiences of "the outside," Elliot recasts migration as a deeply relational entity, and attends to the ethnographic, conceptual, and political imagination required by the constitutive relationship between migration and life.

Acknowledgments
Note on Transliteration
Introduction
Tempos of Life
The Outside Inside
Wives of Elsewhere
Beautiful Futures
The Gender of the Crossing
The Outside
Conclusion: Migration as Life