Contingently elite: affective practices of diasporic urban nightlife consumption

Abstract

ABSTRACTFor diasporic communities fostered through international labor migration, visiting an ancestral homeland can be a transformative encounter. Crossing into “the homeland”, descendants of migrants can reorient from a relatively underprivileged and socioeconomically immobilized minority, into a geopolitically mobile economic elite. For Moroccans from Europe, this transformation recurs every summer, as millions of diasporic visitors – including several family generations post-migration – travel “home” for summer vacation. These visits are as much an investment in belonging “at home” as they are a chance to consume leisure relatively inexpensively – to pursue, for a finite period in this familiar, familial place, affective practices of comparatively elite nighttime urban leisure available to them in Morocco more so than in Europe. As they move between and gather in consumption sites that are relatively inexpensive to them as diasporic visitors, they become a critical mass of nightlife consumers moving around cities in Morocco, becoming emergently and contingently elite.