Faculty of Cultural Studies

The aim of this paper is to study Moroccan music festivals, especially the Essaouira Gnawa festival, against the existing theories on globalization, while contributing new concepts (nomadictates, recurrents and exclusives, wes-turn/eas-turn modernity) aimed at overcoming the reductionism and totalitarianism of the cultural imperialism thesis with regard to artefacts and cultural texts. The grotesque circulation of western cultural artefacts is justifiably judged to be agonizing for cultural theorists who want to be sure that the unequal transmissions of products across the world will not harm the local cultural, linguistic, and economic capital of the less dominant other . We will examine music and festivity in relation to world flows, while holding the argument that the appropriation of western artefacts locally has always been part of a not-so-novel process of mobility of what we call world cultural nomadictates (nomadic dictates). To drive this idea home, we will open the discussion at hand on to existing controversies around notions of place, authenticity, and circulation. The Essaouira festival of Gnawa music and the cosmopolitan Gnawa artist Hakmoun are employed as examples to cover the translocal dynamics of cultural nomadism, whereby humans and objects vacillate constantly between roots and routes.

T his paper 1 deals with madness and badness in music festivals. In the most realistic of non-philosophical imaginings, a madman is a threat; he signals one's death, because if he murders, within his scope of unpredictability, he is just a madman, rising above the logic of blame and guilt -as logic cannot be so insane in nonphilosophical thought. A madman on the loose is a man capable of all sins -most of which hit at the heart of power: divine and worldly. Theory and actual experience demonstrate that power is wobbly, an unstable non-fixed entity because, as Foucault has it, 'there are always also movements in the opposite direction, whereby strategies which co-ordinate relations of power produce new effects and advance into hitherto unaffected domains.' 2 These movements might not be strong enough to change the course of mainstream orders, but the presence of conflicting ideologies makes social sceneries fascinating as power and power-in-reverse both lead to interesting moments of contradiction, struggle, and ambivalence. Madness is therefore a complex pronouncement drawn on self and others. A madman is capable of going naked anytime, anywhere, capable of exposing himself in public in the most daring and veritably shocking 'fuck you' indifference. Accordingly, madness and badness are interconnected, for the reason that when one goes mad one goes bad, and when one goes bad one has 'chosen' to disrupt an existing order of sanity. On many an occasion, the margin outside the festival soon becomes a recipe for forces of production of madness within the festival, as counter-power upshots help power relations grow severe and demanding in atmospheres of festive laughter and drunkenness (both boosters of structures of madness), capable of the manufacturing of new parameters within the status quo that makes it all the more unpredictable and unreliably erratic. As counter-streams in artistic sites now contribute to the conditions of production of social meanings of resistance, however theatrical, they prove capable of verifying and changing the content and form of the mainstream.

Three years after the "Arab Springs", "operation tcharmil" resembles a postrevolutionary suspense, a police enigma where the culprits are known and the crime has yet to be discovered' (Florence Aubenas, Le Monde, 4 August, 2014) 1 This paper revolves around Tcharmil, whose spatial and structural manifestations (i.e. in urban and internet spaces) signal a paradigmatic shift in the existing simple and straightforward meanings of youth violence. It recommends a way to link youth subcultures with the rising spirit of banditry, while minding the broad context of social resistance to political stagnancy as well as the deterioration of fundamental sectors, such as health, education, security, etc. In so doing we could further intensify the diverging symptoms of Moroccan youth's being in the world as well as register the characteristics worth deriving from youth phenomena. By the same token, we aspire to contribute to a far more adept reading of urban youth practices and new (sub)cultural stipulations. The accounts of mcharmlin are therefore vigorous texts for the inspection of conceptual categories like street violence, urban dynamics, youth resistance and counter-power.

This paper examines sites of informal trade in Morocco, what the locals call joutiat (sing. joutia). It departs from the semantic and real-world politics of disposability (of objects and people), to unravel the underlying meanings of the joutia as a contested space.

To cite this article: El Maarouf Moulay Driss & Taieb Belghazi (2018): The event of death: Reflections on the dynamics of emotions and embodied resistance in the Moroccan Contexts of hirak (movement) and laï¿¿hirak ((non)movement), Cultural Studies,

This paper discusses royal pardons and other patronal graces in Morocco as
forms of gifting that borrow their logic from Islamic teachings, and protocols
binding ar-rā’I (ruler) and ar-ri’āya (subjects). The moment they begin to
engage mixed feelings and analyses from politicians, activists, academics, and
the general public they give rise to stormy debates, with as of yet unsettled
disputes in the thick of social and political tensions in Morocco (from the
post-2011 uprisings to the recent al-hirak of El Huceima, to other instances of
social unrest (boycotts of consumables, struggles over human rights
infringements)). As we posit the debate on rentier economy and politics in
the hub of existing theoretical insights on gift-giving, we launch the
particularities, subtleties, and dualities of the gift in general as both desirable
and undesirable, pure and impure, honouring and humiliating, and the royal
gift in particular as a neopatrimonialist act that hinges on referentiality and
preferentiality. We draw on examples of potential royal grace receivers
(classic criminals, political activists, Rif hirakists, amateur gift hunters, and
professional smayria (professional hunters of the royal gift)) as touchstones
for rethinking how patronal gifts are sent (as envois), received and lost
midway. In the end, we conclude that gifting, far from being about sharing
what one has, is about fighting with what one has.

This paper examines games during the COVID-19 pandemic as ontological barriers or barzakhs (singular: barzakh). The traditional meaning of barrier as separation is coupled with the Greek meaning of play as Poiesis (which may also be understood as describing acts of creation). We expand the semantics of ‘barrier’ so as to describe pandemic phenomena that exist at the points at which opposites meet: synthetic game and the world of real game;1 the infected and the healthy; the player and the character being played; life and death. Our perception of both home and the exterior world has changed significantly in the time of the plague. At-home gaming, far from signalling our modern confinement, enables moments in which we may challenge our imprisonment. To bring this idea home, we deploy barzakh as a moral imperative, a site of both necessary isolation and opportunities of engagement, proof of our need for both interaction and distance, a place for the enactment of our knowing and strategic waiting in relation to the pandemic. Through the term, we theorize the link between barrier and other similar categorical divides (distances, masks, gloves, borders and quarantines) which we activate during lockdown to work through our puzzlement, win the social game of civil goodness and to downplay, and ultimately survive, the pandemic of our times

The atmosphere of contestation in Moroccan streets post-2011 has offered children the unique opportunity to participate in mounting social critiques and political protests. This paper contributes to the emerging literature on children and social movements in mena by examining the role children play as social and political activists. We relate a number of examples from the post-2011 events in which children display a mastery of the protocols of protest, glaring back at power and reversing the stereotypes that have long since labeled them pre-political. By exhibiting flexibility at travelling through different (a)geographies and hetero-horologic spheres, children foreground a compelling and pressing plea to see their movements, serious and playful, within the spheres of socio-political action as deserving the system's recognition as well as its academic attention.

This paper studies the role of emotions in creating spectacular revolt situations. We underline the travelling competence of sentiments and their power in crafting trans-local moments of embodied resistance. In contemporary Moroccan society, the adaptation of the Bouazizian style of protest has been a reaction to the prevailing feelings of worthlessness gripping the common citizen. The images of wasted beings in the post-2011 atmosphere have been associated with instances of social insurgence, by individuals who attempt self-immolation, or citizens treated by figures from the centre (e.g. police, public figures) in a way that inculcate in them powerful feelings of abjection, after which they feel irreparably delinked from their sense of humanity. This paper seeks to demonstrate how practices of al-hogra (humiliation) have produced cultural forms of abjection that could also be traced in the way common people inferiorize one another in everyday life through the use of a terminology of trash. By disclosing people's non-subtle armaments of protest (i.e. selfimmolation), we contend that resistance and its various trances, as well as the emotions that prompt them, have their origin in the reality of the body, realistic visions of the body owner and his/her awareness of the potential for realization (through it). Hence we will examine how vulnerable people manipulate the three conditions of corporeality, corporealism and corporealization, to subvert the humiliation and symptoms of social death imposed on them by the regime.

This paper examines sites of informal trade in Morocco, what the locals call joutiat (sing. joutia). It departs from the semantic and real-world politics of disposability (of objects and people), to unravel the underlying meanings of the joutia as a contested space. The joutia is a place where not only objects of value wait to be rediscovered, but also where invisible and socially underprivileged beings perpetually ransack heaps of trade articles to unmask a hidden gem. I provide an account of the social dynamics of abjection inside/outside the joutia, arresting the ambivalence of objects, which-as they keep vacillating between value and lack of it-turn into "treashure". I use this neologism, which combines two antithetical terms (trash and treasure), to (a) put into question issues of visibility and invisibility in informal Moroccan enterprises, (b) crystallise the paradoxes of being and becoming inside and outside the market arena, (c) offer a profound reflection on the absurd nature of value in the informal landscapes of (non)random economy and (d) demonstrate that the forms of abjection inside the market have their origin elsewhere.

The same act of reaching across social boundaries is discussed in Moulay Driss El Maarouf's article The Rise of the Underground where he develops what he refers to as the politics of excrementality; a way to articulate ways of resistance through dirty-mindedness. The music festival, in this case specifically Morocco but conceivably at work everywhere, with its carnivalesque mood becomes a site for vulgar and profane performances not simply from the musicians themselves but from the participants of the festival, which may then engender a community of transgression.

This paper exposes extant but obscured treasure-hunting activities in Morocco which consist of unlawful, risky, and unproductive digging operations. The paper focuses on a community of kanaza (treasure hunters) which shies away from the normal practices of money-making to capitalize on an "echo economy" (echonomy) that relies on orality and hearing (success stories/ information about hidden treasure from past civilizations). It is a community of socially underprivileged individuals who often end up mistaking the economy for its echo, speaking less the language of economy, more the lingo of its shadow. Echonomists, far from designating a new economic model, push the existing definition of economy to the extreme landscapes of signification, denoting careful management not of available but of unavailable resources.