Everyday postcolonial continuities within the trans-Mediterranean migration: From colonial to subversive socio-spatial practices in Algeria

Abstract

Postcolonial Scholarship in migration studies has highlighted how North-South transnational dynamics perpetuate colonial regimes of power. Focusing mostly on transnational spaces that shared a recent colonial past in the Anglo-Saxon context, they identified forms of socio-spatial segregation of the Other grounded on the colonial imagination of the imagined geographies in the South. Privileged migrants enclose themselves in comfort bubbles (Smiley 2010), moving across the “network of expatriates clubs” (Kunz 2018) without encountering the Other, or minimalizing it to instrumental relationships. However, some Scholars showed that transnational dynamics can become a deactivator of the colonial imagination, favouring a fracture in the colonial imagination embodied in intermediate or “subversive” forms of social production (Leonard 2010; Beck 2021).The present work, from a “Mediterranean Thinking” perspective (Zapata-Barrero 2020), contribute to de-centre the postcolonial literature bringing data from the trans-Mediterranean migration of Spaniards to Northern Algeria ranged between 2006 and 2016. From their daily life experiences, I analyse how the colonial imagination of the imagined "Other Moor" designs their socio-spatial production to identify to what extent, the trans-Mediterranean experience reinforces or fractures their colonial imagination. The results show that, even in the absence of a recent colonial past, the colonial imagination of the contemporary Spanish expatriates reinforces the colonial segregation of the "Other Moor". Nevertheless, “subversive” narratives point out the creation of hybrid spaces where more symmetric relationships produce a fracture in the colonial imagination favouring slightly forms of “socio-cultural integration” (Kunz 2022).