Recording Daily Life in the Margins of History and of the Nation: Rachid Nini’s Diary of a Clandestine Migrant

This article examines how Rachid Nini’s Diary of a Clandestine Migrant gives evidence of systemic disempowerment and partly contests it. Availing myself of Giorgio Agamben’s concept of bare life, I show how the text’s thematic pessimism and formal vagrancy are symptomatic of the thwarted promise of emancipation in decolonization’s aftermath.