, even southern Europe and its immigrants were racialized by their northern European heirs. North Africa continued to reflect a border of "otherness", even as it was pulled north, and designated separate from the rest of Africa by virtue of attachment to the equally colonial conception of a distinct 'Middle East' and by its supposedly whiter racial location vis-àvis 'black' or sub-Saharan Africa. Thus, contemporary use of the term 'North Africa' cannot be fully extricated from the coloniality of its racial/geographic origins and significations. It is therefore used here provisionally, in the service of deconstruction.