A Transnational National Identity? Upper-middle-class Moroccan Migrants Setting the Boundaries of Moroccan-ness

• In Event: Race, Gender, Class in the Arab World

Abstract

Maghrebi and Muslim identities face a context of stigmatization in Western Europe. The destigmatization literature informs us on how individuals can respond to stigma, and some works have highlighted how class resources shape these responses. Yet little is known about how elite individuals growing up as the dominant class and Arab-Muslim majority in Morocco experience becoming potentially stigmatized minorities upon migration. Based on in-depth interviews with upper-middle-class young Moroccan professionals who migrated to France for tertiary education, this study examines the identity-making of a population for whom such migration is normalized, and for whom minoritization is therefore a new and class-incongruent experience. A previous study on privileged Muslim Turkish mothers in Berlin identified ethnic distancing and a repositioning as international as a privileged strategy for destigmatization from an ethnic identity associated with working-class status (Yurdakul and Altay 2023). Unlike them, elite Moroccans in France maintain a strong ethno-national identification. They define Moroccan-ness as essentially cosmopolitan by framing their international education, plurilingualism, and transnational mobility as constitutive of their national identity, privileged practices which in turn distance them from the working-class stigma associated with the Maghrebi label in France. Even in the context of French citizenship acquisition, participants claim a Morocco-centered perspective, suggesting that transnational practices do not necessarily involve "decentered attachments" (Vertovec 2009). These results are significant because they show that this former protectorate’s elite does not present the postcolonial intrusion of France into their formation as a threat to the independence and integrity of the Moroccan identity of the upper-middle class.

Author

• Emma Fromont, Harvard University