Jamal Bahmad | Mohamed V University in Rabat (original) (raw)

Books by Jamal Bahmad

Moroccan Cinema Uncut: Decentred Voices, Transnational Perspectives, 2020

This is the first book length study to consider the transnational dimension of Moroccan cinema. O... more This is the first book length study to consider the transnational dimension of Moroccan cinema. Over the past two decades, cinematic production has increased dramatically in Morocco, with Moroccan films leading at the domestic box office and being selected for prestigious international festivals such as Cannes and Berlin. And yet, Moroccan cinema remains little known outside of its national borders. This book asks why this might be and, in so doing, analyses the actual state of Moroccan national cinema beyond a post-colonial optic. Featuring interviews with filmmakers and key industry figures, such as Hicham Laari, Nadir Boumouch and Tala Hadid, the book explores Moroccan cinema’s transnational reach through a focus on the cultural politics of international co-production, the role of international festivals as alternative distribution networks, piracy and digital disruption, film education and activism.

Springer, 2020

This book explores the global spread of English and its ramifications for the status of English i... more This book explores the global spread of English and its ramifications for the status of English in Morocco. It sheds light on motivational issues in English language teaching and learning in Moroccan higher education and examines various teaching practices in terms of: teaching effectiveness, assessment and evaluation, written feedback, English-Arabic translation, and undergraduate supervision. In addition to identifying critical issues in the discipline of English studies and the main challenges facing English departments from historical, institutional, and pedagogical perspectives, it suggests strategies for addressing and overcoming them.

Peer Reviewed Articles by Jamal Bahmad

The uprisings that swept across North Africa and the Middle East in 2011 brought to world attenti... more The uprisings that swept across North Africa and the Middle East in 2011 brought to world attention the revolutionary potential of youth in the face of social injustice and political repression. This article explores how the so-called Arab Spring foregrounded Moroccan youth's alternative conceptions of citizenship and being young in the MENA region today. Using the emergence of citizen cinema as a case study, I will examine the subjective politics of Moroccan youth's alternative to dominant political and social authority. Made, self-produced and distributed online free of charge by a young and self-avowed citizen filmmaker, Nadir Bouhmouch's debut documentary My Makhzen and Me (2012) does not pretend to offer an objective account of Morocco's so-called Arab Spring. Instead, the filmmaker focuses on relating his own personal story as a young upper-class Moroccan student in San Diego, who returned to the country in the summer of 2011 armed with a camera as his weapon in the February 20 Movement's battle for democratic citizenship and social justice in Morocco. In this article, I will show how the subjective point of view structuring this documentary offers a unique perspective not only on Morocco's Arab Spring but also on the impossibility of representing citizenship objectively on the documentary camera. The article ultimately argues that because the personal is always already political in North African documentary filmmaking since 2011, the subjective point of view allows for the emergence of the insurgent citizenship of the region's youth.

This article examines the emergence of what I call the New Urban Cinema (NUC) in Morocco around t... more This article examines the emergence of what I call the New Urban Cinema (NUC) in Morocco around the early 1990s. This term is suggested to replace the so-called New Moroccan Cinema (in capital letters), an exclusive and unsubstantial label which was invented by local journalists and international festival promoters. NUC will be analysed against the backdrop of the socio-economic and political climates of Morocco following the neoliberal market reforms of the 1980s. I will also explore the distinctive features of this new urban cinema by drawing on a few representative films. This task is carried out by identifying three strands within this cinema. The article concludes with a look at the crucial role of youth in the aesthetics and reception of this cinema.

This article deals with the two major actors in North Africa’s 2011 uprisings—namely, youth and t... more This article deals with the two major actors in North Africa’s 2011 uprisings—namely, youth and the city—through a critical exploration of the cinematic realism that has defined Moroccan filmmakers’ response to the country’s socioeconomic transformation under neoliberal globalization since the 1980s. Taking Noureddine Lakhmari’s Casanegra (2008) as a case study, I argue that this aesthetic frame discloses the critical potential of everyday life and the ordinary affects of anger and the will to revolt among Casablanca’s youth today. This acclaimed film further allows us to approach Moroccan cinema’s affective realism within an urban landscape in a country that has witnessed the rise of a new historical consciousness of postcolonial youth on and off the screen. The first part of this article looks at the neoliberal Casablanca that emerged in the aftermath of Morocco’s market reforms in the 1980s and how that transformation engendered a new wave of urban cinema a decade later. The second part looks at Casanegra’s affective economy of anger and revolt and the articulation of Moroccan youth’s postcolonial subjectivity.

Journal of North African Studies

Moroccan filmmakers have chronicled social change and youth’s quest for freedom and postcolonial ... more Moroccan filmmakers have chronicled social change and youth’s quest for freedom and postcolonial agency since the early 1990s. This article examines the representation of Moroccan youth on screen through a close analysis of two recent films which deal with the alternative cultural scene in Casablanca at the turn of the twenty-first century. I will explore how Farida Benlyazid and Abderrahim Mettour’s documentary Casanayda! (2007) and Ahmed Boulane’s feature film The Satanic Angels (2007) unveil youth's search for historical agency in Moroccan society in the years leading up to the mass protests of 2011 across North Africa. Focusing on each film's articulation of the postcolonial subjectivity of young people through a realist aesthetic, the article situates Moroccan youth's quest for agency within the evolution of Casablanca under neoliberal globalization since the 1980s. The chosen films foreground the agency of youth through a focus on their alternative constructions of postcolonial subjectivity in a cultural scene that marries local and global influences in the street, on stage and on screen. What is ultimately reclaimed on the screen is not only urban space for an age group but also the space of justice for an entire society.

Journal of North African Studies

Expressions maghrebines, 2019

This article looks at social inequality in Morocco and aims to show how the specter of radical Is... more This article looks at social inequality in Morocco and aims to show how the specter of radical Islam has come to haunt this society in the era of neoliberal globalization. This argument will be illustrated through a close analysis of Laila Marrakchi’s Marock (2005), a French-Moroccan coproduction and one of the most controversial films released Morocco in the mid-2000s. Based on an episode of the director’s own life, the film is a dramatization of social inequality in Casablanca's upper-class suburbs in the late 1990s. Upon its general release in Morocco in 2006, Marock was attacked by the country's main Islamist party, Justice and Development Party. The film went on toattract record audience numbers. The political controversy about Marock diverted the debate away from the real questions raised by Marrakchi. This transnational Moroccan film depicts existential insecurity among upper-class youth isolated by wealth and its idioms in gated communities in Casablanca’s suburbs. It also, even though quite inadvertently, unveils the spectral resistance of the masses dispossessed by neoliberal globalization in Morocco since the 1980s. This article argues that the inherent contradictions and ethical paradoxes of global capitalism create fissures in the film’s representational edifice, ultimately leading to its dramatic collapse. Integral to Marock’s problem as a postcolonial film is the difficulty—if not impossibility—of speaking ethically from the victor’s position in a neoliberal society. I will read the film against its own grain to unveil some of its unintended strengths as a social text and its problematic cognitive mapping of social inequality in a postcolonial society under globalization. The article concludes with a discussion of how the specter of the Other, the urban poor, haunts Marock through the figure of radical Islam.

Critical Muslim 9 (109-18), Jan 1, 2014

Stirling International Journal of Postgraduate Research, 2012

Our world changes daily with revolutions in science, medicine, technology, and culture occurring ... more Our world changes daily with revolutions in science, medicine, technology, and culture occurring with ever increasing rapidity; but how comprehensive is change? Is there, in fact, inherent value in, or an inevitability of, continuities? Such questions can be found being considered across a broad and diverse range of academic work and, for this reason, we were drawn to the theme of continuity and change as one which could illustrate the potential scope in such work, and we have not been disappointed in the response to our call for papers. When the first open meeting regarding an online peer-reviewed inter-disciplinary journal at Stirling commenced in June 2011 no one was fully aware of the trials and tribulations that would befall the subsequently formed editorial board and wider team in the production of such an online publication; but the journey has been an enlightening one for all and seen this seed of an idea grow into reality. Discussions of how to make the journal the perfect platform for junior researchers from across the spectrum to get their work into a public forum have been at the centre of the project throughout, and we hope that this aim can be continued through the subsequent issues of the Stirling Postgraduate International Journal of Research (inSPIRE). The papers collected here offer responses to the theme of continuity and change through a broad range of research encompassing a number of disciplines. From Scottish archaeology to infrastructural development in India, our pilot issue opens up a door to new and exciting postgraduate research. Hannah Donaldson's piece explores the introduction of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities in the context of changes in attitudes to disability and the associated models which informed UN debate and policy-making. Donaldson questions whether societal changes in disability however are adequately reflected in the Convention. Emma Smith explores domestic violence as an example of continuity and change in gender inequality discussing resilient stereotypes , feminism, and socioeconomic change to offer an evaluation of the roots of the issue, along with insights into ways in which to eliminate the problem.

Filmatique, 2017

Whilst numerous Moroccan films have explored radical Islam since the 2003 Casablanca bombings, th... more Whilst numerous Moroccan films have explored radical Islam since the 2003 Casablanca bombings, the Geneva-based Moroccan-Swiss filmmaker and scriptwriter Mohcine Besri was among the first to tackle terrorism and its impact in Morocco and beyond. Laurent Nègre's 2010 film Operation Casablanca, based on a script by Besri, traces the journey of Saadi, an undocumented Moroccan migrant who gets arrested by the police as he tries to cross the Swiss-French border. He is suspected of belonging to a terrorist group that has just kidnapped the UN secretary general. The film is part thriller, part comedy and succeeds in portraying the terrorists as human beings like us, without condoning their dark motives.

Such ethical nuance is where Besri's touch is most evident; it forms the backbone of his own film The Miscreants, which was shot on location in Morocco and widely appreciated by local critics and audiences. A Moroccan-Swiss co-production, the film focuses on a group of five young actors who embark on a nationwide tour with their latest theatre show. The actors get kidnapped by three members of a terrorist organization and are taken to a remote location in Morocco's Middle Atlas mountains. The kidnappers hold the actors hostage for seven days while awaiting orders from their superiors in the Jmaât El Jihad terrorist organization.

Book Chapters by Jamal Bahmad

Women in Amazigh Cinema , 2023

In this article, I aim to reclaim the voice of Imazighen from French colonial cinema by reading I... more In this article, I aim to reclaim the voice of Imazighen from French colonial cinema by reading Itto against the background of the French Berber policy in Morocco. It will be shown that this celebrated film adopts the ideological line of the French Berber myth and uses modern medicine and colonial knowledge to subdue the Amazigh tribal confederations as they
relentlessly resisted the French conquest of Morocco.

Jewish–Muslim Interactions: Performing Cultures between North Africa and France, 2020

The Moroccan-French director Kamal Hachkar’s debut documentary film Tinghir-Jérusalem: Les échos ... more The Moroccan-French director Kamal Hachkar’s debut documentary film Tinghir-Jérusalem: Les échos du Mellah [‘Tinghir-Jerusalem: Echoes from the Mellah’] was the subject of much public debate in Morocco after its first airing on television in 2012. What was intended by the young director as a feature film about his feelings of nostalgia and attachment to the past of his hometown’s Jewish community touched many nerves in the Moroccan political scene and wider society. The airing of the documentary on the state television channel 2M in April 2012 and its subsequent inclusion in the official selection of the National Film Festival in Tangier in February 2013 were enough to get Moroccan political parties, several public intellectuals, and civil society in general talking heatedly about the film for months on end (Bahmad, 2013). Tinghir-Jérusalem’s illustrious tour in the international festival circuit where it garnered many accolades and much critical acclaim in the following months further intensified the debate between the film’s supporters and detractors. The present chapter opens with a short introduction to the life and times of Moroccan Jews in Morocco with a particular focus on Tinghir, followed by a brief account of the political reception of Hachkar’s documentary film in Morocco, before moving to explore the documentary’s reliance on the potentialities of affect and silence in exploring Tinghir’s Jewish community between the past and the present. This affective use of silence traverses the film’s narrative voice as well as the characters’ acts of past remembrance and speculation about the future of a millennial community that is today faced with loss and disappearance. The close analysis of Hachkar’s Tinghir-Jérusalem is anchored by reflections on the uses of the affective power of silence on the screen, which will be explored critically through a Deleuzian framing of the non-representationality of affect.

English Language Teaching in Moroccan Higher Education , 2020

This introductory chapter provides a survey of the history and current situation of English as a ... more This introductory chapter provides a survey of the history and current situation of English as a medium of instruction and research production in Moroccan higher education. It opens with a historical account of the diplomatic relations between Morocco and the English-speaking world. English made its entry into the Moroccan university in the 1960s, and its influence has grown apace especially in the era of globalization. The second part of the chapter outlines a series of challenges facing the departments of English in Moroccan higher education institutions. Finally, we preview the sixteen chapters in this volume, which consists of extensive and empirical studies by experienced Moroccan faculty members.

English Language Teaching in Moroccan Higher Education , 2020

This chapter explores several challenges facing English studies at the Moroccan University with a... more This chapter explores several challenges facing English studies at the Moroccan University with a focus on how the English department is affected by the neoliberal policymaking environment of successive Moroccan governments since the 1980s. The contribution provides a political economy analysis of the problems and challenges facing the English department. The chapter is based on empirical data gathered through and enriched by the author’s first-hand experience as a professor in the English department at the Faculty of Letters and Humanities, Mohammed V University in Rabat. The analysis also builds on the existing literature, even though scanty, on the English department and the public university in Morocco. It places the crisis of the English department and the Moroccan university today within the specific context of Moroccan education and economic policy since the neoliberal market reforms in the 1980s. The first part of the chapter explores the evolution of the mission of the English studies department and some of the challenges it has faced since its inception in 1963. The following part puts these challenges in context by foregrounding the latent causes of the crisis of the English department and the Moroccan university in an era of neoliberal governmentality and private-sector competition. This contextual factor has hitherto been ignored in the literature even though it is a key aspect of the crisis of the English department in particular and the Moroccan university in general. Finally, the chapter provides a number of practical measures susceptible to taking the English department out of its current crisis in spite of the overwhelming pessimism among academic staff and policy observers in the Moroccan education sector.

by khrouz nadia, Nazarena Lanza, Mehdi Alioua, anna dessertine, Jean-Pierre Taing, chad bou, lionel nzamba, Weyel Silja, Bouchra SIDI HIDA, Barrière Dorothée, Niandou TOURE, Sylvain Beck, Valerie Orlando, Jamal Bahmad, Karibi Khadija, and Ellinor Zeino-Mahmalat

Ce recueil de courts articles, co-dirigé par Nazarena Lanza et Nadia Khrouz, rassemble des regard... more Ce recueil de courts articles, co-dirigé par Nazarena Lanza et Nadia Khrouz, rassemble des regards de chercheurs travaillant sur les migrations dans leur sens le plus large et sur les changements sociaux qu’elles engendrent et parfois impulsent au Maroc. Cet ouvrage collectif opère des zooms sur leurs terrains spécifiques et apporte des éclairages susceptibles d’alimenter des réflexions et une meilleure connaissance des présences d’étrangers au Maroc, dans leur diversité et leur complexité.
Co éditée par la Fondation Konrad Adenauer Stiftung de Rabat et le Centre Jacques Berque pour les études en Sciences Humaines et Sociales (CJB), il est le fruit d’un travail de réflexion initié dans le cadre de deux journées d’étude, « Présence des étrangers, cosmopolitisme et changements sociaux au Maroc contemporain », qui se sont tenues à Rabat les 3 et 4 novembre 2014.

Dialogic Configurations in Post-Colonial Morocco: Rhetorical Conjectures in Arts, Culture and Politics, 2019

This chapter investigates the complex relationship between political violence, transitional justi... more This chapter investigates the complex relationship between political violence, transitional justice and film aesthetics in contemporary Morocco. A product of the postcolonial period, Moroccan cinema is taken as a case study of how African filmmakers have engaged with the rampant dramatic episodes of violence in the post-colonial history of the continent. In a similar fashion to writers and other artists, film directors have striven to represent and thereby illuminate the origins and consequences of political violence, which has marred African history since the mid-twentieth century. What makes cinema unique in a varied and crowded landscape of aesthetic representations of political violence and the questions of transitional justice is its mass reach and unwavering appeal in a continent where levels of book reading are notoriously low. In contrast, films are watched by millions of viewers despite the crisis of film theatres, which have been declining in number across much of Africa. In many cases, it was severe political violence that eroded key aspects of public life including cinemagoing and sometimes the very possibility of making films. For example, the civil war in Algeria in the 1990s not only led to an almost total closure of cinemas because they were high targets of terrorist attacks, but also forced most established Algerian filmmakers to migrate abroad for two main reasons: to escape assassination in a country where intellectuals were among the priority victims of terrorism, and to seek the financial and political stability necessary for making films. In this chapter, I report the findings of a research project funded by the African Peacebuilding Network of the Social Science Research Council from June to December 2017. The project has investigated the untapped potential and Moroccan cinema for transitional justice peacebuilding. I have particularly focussed on how this cinema weaves its poetics of transitional justice by revisiting the recent past of political violence and official transitional justice discourse and practice. The first part of the chapter provides a brief account of violence which has deeply affected Moroccan politics and society. The next part dwells on some of the key findings of my APN research project. Finally, I will provide some concluding remarks and policymaking recommendations at the intersection of film aesthetics and peacebuilding efforts in Morocco today.

Moroccan post-colonial cinema has suffered from the lack of adequate channels of domestic and int... more Moroccan post-colonial cinema has suffered from the lack of adequate channels of domestic and international distribution and exhibition for most of its relatively short history. Despite the existence of a burgeoning distribution business and a wide network of cinemas across the country, distributors were broadly not interested in investing in national films until the 1990s. Up until that point in time, local films were not deemed interesting or lucrative enough in comparison with high-grossing Hollywood and Bollywood movies , which, due to their mass production scale, cost many times less per copy than local productions. However, things began to change in the early 1990s when a lone investor decided to distribute Abdelkader Lagtaâ's H UB FI D AR AL-BEIDA ("A LOVE AFFAIR IN CASABLANCA " 1991). The film was an instant box office hit and, in the process, proved beyond doubt that the distribution and exhibition of national films could make a profit. Distribution has subsequently played a crucial role in the growth of Moroccan cinema in both quantitative and qualitative terms. However, national cinema today faces new distribution and exhibition challenges, in particular the decline of cinema theatres and the emergence of film piracy. The latter is said to have seriously undermined the economic profitability of the legal distribution economy. In this essay, I want to argue against the grain of the pessimism characterizing the dominant discourse about the future of Moroccan cinema in the face of these two challenges. My argument is that film theatre closures and the prevalence of online and offline piracy are not in themselves life-threatening to Moroccan cinema. Instead, they are indicators of how a post-colonial cinema is adapting to the challenges of globalization and the digital revolution. Moroccan films are increasingly watched at home or on mobile devices rather than on big screens in dark rooms. In the same vein, the proliferation of online and CD-based piracy is not proven to have discouraged people from going to the cinemas to watch Moroccan films. The decline of filmgoing culture has other, much deeper social, demographic, and technological causes. The rise of new forms of circulation and consumption of Moroccan cinema in the twenty-first century is a sign of the emergence of novel and dynamic forms of “popular” film distribution and viewership.

Moroccan Cinema Uncut: Decentred Voices, Transnational Perspectives, 2020

Springer, 2020

Journal of North African Studies

Expressions maghrebines, 2019

Critical Muslim 9 (109-18), Jan 1, 2014

Stirling International Journal of Postgraduate Research, 2012

Filmatique, 2017

Women in Amazigh Cinema , 2023

Jewish–Muslim Interactions: Performing Cultures between North Africa and France, 2020

English Language Teaching in Moroccan Higher Education , 2020

Dialogic Configurations in Post-Colonial Morocco: Rhetorical Conjectures in Arts, Culture and Politics, 2019

The Film Festival Yearbook

Arab Subcultures: Transformations in Theory and Practice, 2016

This chapter examines the location and transnational circulation of youth subcultures in recent M... more This chapter examines the location and transnational circulation of youth subcultures in recent Moroccan cinema. Cultural globalisation in Morocco intensified in the 1990s in the wake of neoliberal market reforms implemented from the 1980s onwards and in the shadow of the relative political opening of the country brought about by social change and the end of the Cold War. Other social transformations including relentless urbanisation, demographic changes and the advent of transnational media and communication technologies have been behind the growth of new forms of youth subcultures in Morocco, particularly in large cities such as Casablanca. This chapter aims to demonstrate how instead of passive consumers of global subculture, Moroccan youth have been full postcolonial agents in the translation and adaptation of global flows to their cultural heritage, consumption habits and living conditions. Moroccan cinema has engaged with the evolution of local subcultures in Moroccan urban and national space in recent times. This chapter examines the articulation of youth postcolonial subjectivities through subculture as a transnational economy of flows. Hicham Lasri’s feature film The End (2010) is taken as an example of a work of art which articulates the local response to global subcultures from the standpoint of ordinary youth in twenty-first century Morocco. Shot on digital and saturated with the effects of the MTV video and commercial ads, The End inscribes its aesthetic within that of the Nayda subcultural movement in Morocco. A movie-besotted adolescent in the 1990s, Lasri came of age under the Nayda scene in Casablanca, where he was born in 1977. The film’s deployment of what I call a trash aesthetic translates rather than imitates global subcultures.

Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication, 2016

Journal of American Studies of Turkey

Open Democracy, Jan 9, 2014

Africa at LSE , Nov 12, 2013

As part of our series examining the origins of Africa’s War of Terror, Jamal Bahmad analyses the ... more As part of our series examining the origins of Africa’s War of Terror, Jamal Bahmad analyses the social origins of Islamic militancy and terrorism in North and West Africa through its depiction in film.

English Language Teaching in Moroccan Higher Education, 2020

Journal of African Cinemas

Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication, 2013

The State of Post-Cinema, 2016

Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication, 2016

The Journal of North African Studies, Jul 9, 2012

The Journal of North African Studies, 2015

Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 2014

The Journal of North African Studies, 2014

ABSTRACT

Modern & Contemporary France, 2014

The Journal of North African Studies, 2012