Pursuing Opacity: Geographies of Visibility in the Western Mediterranean

Abstract

The Moroccan and Spanish governments pursue the visibility of people and things. They observe and survey in order to codify, catalogue, classify, and calculate. Rather than trace the contours of such projects, this paper seeks to provoke a more sustained engagement with modes of errantry that confound their logics of command and control. Building on more than 18 months of multi-sited ethnography, it explores how marginalised communities navigate unequal geographies of visibility. To do so, I revisit the work of Édouard Glissant and some of his interlocutors to contemplate fluctuating vectors of opacity amongst communities living in hashish trafficking hubs. Frequently stigmatised as violent criminals and indolent freeloaders—their itineraries effaced—inhabitants of La Atunara (Spain) and the central Rif (Morocco) grapple with detection and wrestle with capture. This paper explores these positionings without reading them as disarray or disorder but as purposeful refusals worthy of political reflection.