Making Use of Everything: Tangier and Its Southern, Peripheral Practices

Abstract

Reflecting on the variegated trajectories of urban development in Tangier, a city both in and out of conventional senses of the global South, the essay reflects on “Southern questions” in terms of peripheries everywhere. Here, the notion of peripheries as extensions of something integral is displaced in favor of the ways in which geographical and political binaries extend each other, albeit with marked power differentials, into incompleteness. So, instead of the South embodying specific capacities, enclosures, ontologies, and potentials, it is rather its various tracks and circulations, rather than consolidations, that engender dispositions beyond clear apprehension or capture. Thinking of such extensions through the lens of Blackness, the South becomes a mode of exposure to a wider world that both unsettles the ruling calculus of what counts as lives worth living and pieces together territories of operation that cut across technologies of bordering even as borders remain obdurate and exclusionary. Here the South is a space within and beyond capture, a periphery that can appear anywhere. What becomes important, then, are the relays between those who venture off, seek to cultivate, or are enfolded into new terrain and those who remain, bear witness to changing or obdurate conditions in place, with each position remaining somewhat peripheral and independent upon each other.