In North Africa, from the eve of French colonial conquest to independence, we find transvestism—individuals cross-dressing as other races, other genders, other religions. That transvestic figures not only existed but were an important reality in colonial North Africa seems paradoxical, for French and British empires were predicated upon dividing colonizer from colonized. Yet from the eve of French conquest, we find Europeans dressed as native Arabs and Jews, Jews passed as Muslims, women created new personas as men. Transvestites blur boundaries between European and native, Jew and Arab, and challenging the boundary itself (Marjorie Garber). In the postcolonial era, drag seems to cut the other way; it is North Africans who play with multiple genders/languages/races. Two prominent French-Jewish-North African male comedians perform standup routines by dressing as women and code switching between French and Arabic. A contemporary Moroccan visual artist calls herself “Lalla Essaydi,” (“Madame-Sir”), and appropriates the historically male languages of European Orientalist painting and Moroccan Islamic textual calligraphy for a woman-centered photographic art. Somehow, transvestism allows one to speak in multiple voices, to speak a lived experience that is layered and fragmented, to say what cannot otherwise be said. Transvestism allows the speaker to be me and not-me. As Gad El Maleh says with the title of his drag standup, “L’Autre c’est moi, “The Other is Me.” The ubiquity of drag raises questions about what drag is, why it was, and what it means in the colonial context. Historical inquiry will show the times and situations in which identities ossify and drag becomes subversive. What is the boundary, how is it imagined, who polices it, when and why? How does drag differ from colonial hybridity, a goal of French colonial empire? The objective of this paper is to provide a historical framework for understanding drag and transvestism, from precolonial to postcolonial North Africa. This cultural history will draw upon literature, archives, ethnography, comedy, photography, and fine art.

Recent cultural production in Morocco has emphasized the impact of migration on constructions of identity and reimagining of forms of belonging. In Abslemo al-Nasrani, a novel published in 2016 by the Moroccan writer Abdelhamid al-Bajuqi, a visit of a Spanish student from Complutense University to Morocco to attend an academic conference turns into a search for the story of his next novel which is at the same time the retelling of the complex interethnic origin and multicultural circumstances in which his parents met and his upbringing and conversion in an orphanage in Tangier. In the process of recovering the convoluted story of his complex origin of his father, a Moroccan illegal migrant and refugee in Spain, the novel not only establishes many cultural and historical parallels between different events and stories but brings together many cultural groups and ethno-racial communities across the straits of The Mediterranean, in Spain and Morocco. In this paper, I analyze the rhetoric of transnational homemaking as a response to the realities engendered by the crossing of boundaries of insular categories of nationalism, race and ethnicity in the contemporary migratory space between Morocco and Spain. I also examine the ways the novel offers not only a postcolonial reflection on changing modalities of identity grounding but also an engagement with emergent forms of belonging that interrogate monolithic interpretations of identity that are static and rewrite belonging and otherness as an ongoing process of self-discovery that depends on developing new alliances and solidarities of values and perspective from within an evolving multi-intersectional movement towards diversity and nomadic forms of being.

This article discerns an emerging migratory disposition among the ‘second-generation’ in Western Europe. Born and raised as European citizens in countries like France, Belgium, and The Netherlands, some of the Maghrebi offspring of traditional migrant ‘guest workers’ from North Africa (Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia) now appear to aspire and engage in a renewed outward migration. This is especially the case for tertiary-educated males and females who seek upward social mobility but feel curbed in their efforts by a series of racial stigma in the labor market and European society at large. Based on long-term fieldwork in Dubai, this ethnography focuses on the ways in which these formerly abjected Maghrebi-Muslim minority publics from Europe reshape a sense of ‘home’ in the Arab Gulf, challenging thereby Dubai’s common theorization as an ‘impermanent city’ or a mere ‘transit state’. Not only do I detail how my interlocutors entertain a sort of ‘permanence in temporality’, their longer-term settlement intentions also put to question much of the mainstream literature on ‘integration’ precisely because, for them, holding citizenship did not correlate with a sense of inclusion, neither in Europe nor in the UAE. For many of these (highly) skilled workers, Dubai functions as a fragile yet emancipatory and canopy-like space in which previous racial stigma are suspended, if not suddenly inverted. For instance, the appropriation of the social status of ‘expat’ allows them to ‘become European/white’, thus allowing for a more liminal field of race blending and playful social identification (European, Arab, Muslim) to take shape. In trying to make sense of a series of celebratory narratives about Dubai – as a ‘cosmopolitan city’, a ‘home in diversity’, a ‘safe heaven’, or as a site of ‘professional development’, as my informants would say – I further develop a reading of cosmopolitanism that is based primarily on daily experiences of favourable (class) positionality in social space, which stands in stark contrast to an ever-narrowing social imagination in Europe. Ultimately, this paper seeks to unsettle Europe-as-center in global epistemologies on migration and inclusion by focusing on the Arab Gulf region, complicate the literature on exclusion and segregation in Dubai by highlighting unstudied ‘inclusionary assemblages’ on site, and draw attention to the hybrid agency of upwardly mobile minorities who skillfully draw on various subject positions in navigating the UAE’s complex privilege regime. In doing so, it demonstrates how, they too, co-shape Dubai’s increasingly diverse outlook as an emerging global city.