The Outside: Migration as Life in Morocco

by Alice Elliot

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 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.

204 pages, Paperback

Published April 6, 2021

Reviews

[irem ( ˶ˆᗜˆ˵ ) · Rating 4 out of 5]

I had the opportunity to meet the author, she was the sweetest person and so welcoming about questions I had on the book.

Great fieldwork. Something that I crave in nonfiction is soul, I believe this book had it.

[Ava · Rating 5 out of 5]

EXCEPTIONAL ethnography with fascinating theoretical, sociological, and even linguistic engagements. A brilliant read.

[Kulsum · Rating 3 out of 5]

Excellent ethnography. I thought it was a really interesting concept she developed here.