ABSTRACT
This empirical chapter presents the diasporic practice of visiting home through vignettes, disassembling and interweaving a summer holiday into the co-occurring forces of embodiments, attachments, and insulations. ‘Embodiments’ show how diasporic visitors (DVs) are physically and materially experiencing their presence in Morocco, both as individual bodies and as a collective of bodies traveling individually-but-together in parallel rhythms on an annual basis. Diasporic ‘attachment’ practices are those that act both as a positive centripetal force, pulling individuals in to visiting Morocco, and as a centrifugal force, pushing them away when the pressure of familial obligation becomes too intense. DVs are attracted to visit Morocco by a sense of rootedness and sometimes nostalgia, but also actively resist some expectations about how they will spend their time while there. Finally, emergent ‘insulations’ vignettes show how DVs are leisure-seekers, both enthusiastically participating in a ‘homeland Morocco’ full of their family and friends, and simultaneously, as a collective mass of bodies, reinforcing spaces of exclusivity among their ‘own,’ ‘strange’ (diasporic) crowd – by purposefully excluding, or being excluded by, others, or through neutral individual choices and preferences that accumulate into an exclusive collectivity.
