The Places We Share

Migration, Subjectivity, and Global Mobility

Contributions by Leila Abouhouraira, Fatima Badry, Shana Cohen, Evelyn A. Early, Nabiha Jerad, Smain Laacher, Abderrahmane Lakhsassi, Nick Mai, Justin McGuinness, Nadia Tazi, Susan Terrio Edited by Susan Ossman

Publication date:

09 February 2007

Length of book:

240 pages

Publisher

Lexington Books

Dimensions:

239x160mm
6x9"

ISBN-13: 9780739117088

While some people study globalization, others live their lives as global experiments. This book brings together people who do both. The authors or subjects of these studies are of diverse national, religious, and ethnic backgrounds. What they have in common is a connection to Morocco. It is from this shared space that they draw on personal stories, fieldwork, and literary and linguistic analysis to provide a critical, socially reflexive response to the conceptions of culture, identity, and mobility that animate debates on migration and cosmopolitanism. On the trail of the Bedouin or Europe's new nomads and of Zaccarias Moussaoui Places We Share explores the relationship of mobility to subjectivity, and how physically moving can be a way of escaping the stigma of being an immigrant. Reading Rushdie, listening to Moroccan women converse in the UAE, or examining how the experience of serial migration can shape comparative ethnography we become more aware of how moving pushes us up against the limits of global experience. These limits must be recognized. They can be positively embraced to develop new ways of conceiving of ourselves, the world and our connections to others.
This volume, edited by Susan Ossman, deals with issues of great importance and relevance for our era. In an era where there is a widespread preoccupation with the quantitative categorisation of migrants' personal or collective characteristics, this book offers a quite different perspective which gives emphasis to subjectivity, identity fluidity, representations of mobility and space, and culture. Overall, this book is a valuable resource offering an alternative perspective on migration. It makes for a wonderful read!