Farouk El Maarouf | Justus-Liebig-University Giessen (original) (raw)

Journal Papers by Farouk El Maarouf

Springer Nature Switzerland AG, 2024

This paper addresses contemporary comedy as a nuanced reflection of societal moods shaped by ongo... more This paper addresses contemporary comedy as a nuanced reflection of societal moods shaped by ongoing struggles and universal human predicaments. Introducing the concept of memesis, the study dwells into its postdigital manifestations and impact on individuals involved in meme creation and consumption. Amid societal crises, humor emerges as a coping mechanism and a mode of communication, providing solace to those affected. The analysis of ‘disaster-funny’ reveals how disasters can elicit laughter and agony, among other things. Examining memes’ role in altering perceptions of catastrophic events, the paper illustrates how memetic humor reflects societal anxieties and trivializes dire situations. Memesis is portrayed as a self-deprecating mechanism navigating the inherent anxieties in creating and consuming humorous content during crises. The paper concludes by emphasizing the transient nature of laughter, temporarily mitigating tragedy while leaving underlying anxieties intact, resulting in a complex emotional experience.

Al-Misbahia - Revue de la Faculté des Lettres et des Sciences Humaines Saïs, Fes, 2024

Critical African Studies , 2024

Torn between desire and hope, patience and impatience, those waiting for change in Morocco have, ... more Torn between desire and hope, patience and impatience, those waiting for change in Morocco have, since independence, been articulating their rejection of the way the queues of dignity and social justice are getting intolerably static and crowded. This articleFootnote1 reasons with cultural and socio-political gradations of waiting in the Muslim and Moroccan tradition to discuss how the dynamics of waiting and not waiting reflect the poor people’s methods of tolerating or challenging the prevailing truth. We theoretically and empirically make sense of the way political stagnancy and social nothingness culminate into what we call a state of (asitism) or (as-it-is-ism), a proponent as it were of obdurate stagnancy, deferral of personal and collective expectations, and persistence of social plights and economic ills, that are continuously informed and challenged by waiting and non-waiting protocols. To get to grips with asitism as a conceptual tool and ontological phenomenon, this article takes into consideration how and why the subjects revolt, whether it be by seeking migration opportunities to Europe; by illegally crossing the borders; or by otherwise expressing their denunciation of the way politicians seek to dupe them into more waiting. However, even when they refuse to wait for the promises politicians make to be verified as truthful or fake by not taking part in the elections or by boycotting a particular party, we contend that they simply deploy the time they have for a different wait, hence re-organising themselves in a different queuing order.

Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication, 2023

In nashat-loaded circles, the shikha, claiming the center of her pedestal, asks the question: 'al... more In nashat-loaded circles, the shikha, claiming the center of her pedestal, asks the question: 'al-hlawa fin kayna?' (sweetness, where is it?). She pauses tantalizingly and looks around, but no one offers an answer. She inquires again with a smile. As she proceeds, what seems like mere initiation into eroticism and sensuality becomes a deeply philosophical pursuit of the rather far-flung meanings of the female and her body. While the shikha is no academician, she constructs through dance and lyrics a body of thought that navigates across a constellation of dialectics: female prevailing/alternative realities, gaming/thinking, play/seriousness and representation/agency. This article discusses female performers not as the embodiment of the carnivalesque, parodism, playfulness, profanity and voyeurism but as potential theorists in the domain of nashat where speculations on the existence of sweetness can easily become about its absence, deficiency and lack. It also addresses shikhat as potential theory-makers and proto-philosophers oscillating between epistemic margins and centers while leading the popular musical and performative scenes with primordial advice, guidance, teaching and wisdom.

Journal of Anthropological Research Volume 79, Number 1, 2023

This paper exposes extant but obscured treasure-hunting activities in Morocco which consist of un... more 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.

MECAM papers, 2022

Recently, festivals have come to acquire unprecedented importance in Morocco. Today, one can enjo... more Recently, festivals have come to acquire unprecedented importance in Morocco. Today,
one can enjoy an entire year full of the country’s different festivities, among them Mawazine, the Gnaoua Festival, the Almond Blossom Festival, the Fez Festival of World Sacred
Music, and the Imilchil Marriage Festival.
• Structurally, Moroccan festivals have undergone a crucial change during the last 20 years. They are no longer discrete and isolated cultural events. They have shifted from being typically local and rural celebrations (moussems) to events global in nature. Ideologically, they are rationally produced and professionally managed. Socially, they are arbitrated through a volatile, unsteady, and yet innovative context of sociopolitical conflict.
• While analysing the Jidar Street Art Festival more specifically, the article discusses the politics of possession regarding the city walls in Morocco’s capital, as taking place through small-scale, personal endeavours or with large-scale visibility under state patronage.
• As such, the Jidar Street Art Festival has a great impact on the cultural and local understanding of the urban city. The murals become the urban image, functioning along the lines of city gentrification, and a representation of the world which systematically ignores the truth on the ground lying beyond the colourful walls higher up.

The atmosphere of contestation in Moroccan streets post-2011 has offered children the unique oppo... more 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.

COVID-19 has crowned1 a number of other disasters (wildfires in Australia, Desert Locusts in Keny... more COVID-19 has crowned1 a number of other disasters (wildfires in Australia, Desert Locusts in Kenya, an imminent WWIII merging Iran and the US), causing panic to click into place and horror to become our global predicament, making us realize that we live in the illusion of the permanence of things, of mastery, and of immortality. People’s turning to social media for trans-local news on COVID-19 has stirred great ire in the world. This led to the proliferation of dark images that associate the viral catastrophe with the end as we know it. To problematize the idea of the apocalypse (or the end) this paper speaks of three moments of survival in human existence: the beneath, the behind and the beyond. We argue that the apocalyptic nature of the pandemic and its global horrorism are part of a congeries of apocalyptic simulations that have always been part of the narrative with which we try to define ourexistence on earth. This paper masks itself against perfunctory examinations of the term apocalypse, and offers instead an understanding that runs along the lines of its Greek etymological sense as apokalyptein (revelation). It offers what Foucault calls an ontology of the present, that interrogates the history of COVID -19 with an emphasis neither on its origin nor on its telos. As beyondists, the COVID-19 catastrophe has revealed to us that 1) we have ‘access to knowledge beyond knowledge’ (see Gumpert 2012), and therefore that 2) our modern predicament is not very modern. The end, (not) to be sure, has been lived and relived in the boundary between reality and simulation. After all, the end of something comprises the beginning (in reverse) of that which “endeth”, throwing the beyond, behind and beneath in the Ferris wheel of epistemological and existential entanglement.
Keywords: Apocalypse, COVID-19, the end, pandemic, simulation, the beyond
Below is the link for the whole article:

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00131857.2020.1757426

https://doi.org/10.1080/00131857.2020.1757426

Matatu-BRILL, 2020

The city reflects a politics of possession, upon which pieces of land ultimately get encircled by... more The city reflects a politics of possession, upon which pieces of land ultimately get encircled by walls for exploitation. Walls-the entities that frame up the city-are territory ma(r)kers, yet this architectural gesture, far from being innocent, symbolizes a lurking desire at owning territories in the ma(r)king. This paper brings this idea home by examining the other meanings of the wall in contemporary Morocco, by closely studying the poetics and politics of the wall in the context of the Jidar street art festival of Rabat, situated, as it were, in the intersection of concepts (such as festival, paint, street art, wall, patronage, cooptation, resistance, local and global). We argue that the JSAF presents, among other things, a venue for local artists to perform and translate their thoughts and artistic visions into murals of a grand scale. Yet under the gaze of power, their performances accentuate the existentialist yet ambivalent position of city walls not only as embodiments of visual escape, but also as terrains of artistic/eco-nomic opportunities, incompatible social emotions, and contentious politics.

Call for Contributions by Farouk El Maarouf

https://trafo.hypotheses.org/32076, 2022

We invite contributions that address but are not limited to the following questions: How are thes... more We invite contributions that address but are not limited to the following questions: How are these approaches to temporalities mediated and reimagined in text, sound, and/or image? What visions of the future do these artworks offer? How are these visions shaped by knowledge of the past and present, and how do they shape the past and present in turn? How are public or private memories formed, challenged, or reimagined? How are they related to each other? And how do these practices articulate a present reality that draws from pasts as much as it evokes a multiplicity of futures – a reality that functions here (in the Maghreb and the Mashriq) and now, while seeking to peek over the borders at there and then? Looking at different forms of art, documentary and fiction films, literature, popular culture, visual narratives, and music, the series also considers, among others, questions of utopia/dystopia, precarity, migration, memory, and gender.

Conference Presentations by Farouk El Maarouf

TRAFO Blog for Transregional Research. MECAM. , 2022

Papers by Farouk El Maarouf

Journal of Anthropological Research