Youth and the Occupation of Public Space in Moroccan Cinema (original) (raw)
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Rebels with a Cause: Youth, Globalization and Postcolonial Agency in Moroccan Cinema
Journal of North African Studies
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.
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.
Nordic Journal of Dance, 2017
How people move and appear in public spaces is a reflection of the cultural, religious and socio-political forces in a society. This article, built on an earlier work titled ’Site-Specific Dance: Women in the Middle East’ (2016), addresses the ways in which dance in a public space can support the principles of freedom of expression and gender equality in Tunisia. I explore the character of public space before, during, and after the Arab Spring uprisings. Adopting an ethnographic and phenomenological approach, I focus on the efforts of two Tunisian dancers – Bahri Ben Yahmed (a dancer, choreographer and filmmaker based in Tunis, who has trained in ballet, modern dance and hip hop) and Ahmed Guerfel (a dancer based in Gabès, who has trained in hip hop) – to examine movement in a public space to address political issues facing the society. An analysis of data obtained from Yahmed and Guerfel, including structured interviews, videos, photos, articles and e-mail correspondence, supports ...
MOROCCO'S HIRAK AL-RIF MOVEMENT: "YOUTHS OF THE NEIGHBOURHOOD" AS INNOVATIVE PROTESTERS?
Partecipazione e Conflitto, 2021
This article examines how protesters produce new tactics by focusing specifically on Hirak Al-Rif, a protest movement which took place in Morocco in 2016-2017. Drawing on several sources (e.g. semi-structured interviews, non-participant observations, live-streamed Facebook videos, and digital traces), the article shows how new tactics can derive from routine activities and, by focusing on the role of newcomers, suggests to go beyond a strictly top-down model of mobilisations. Newcomers relied on everyday routines at the neighbourhood level and amplified the dynamic of protests in a way that went beyond the initial expectations of core activists. Tactical innovations can thus be fostered through pressures and reappropriations enacted "from below", which bind core activists to the wider base of the movement through moral obligations. Biographical experiences, prior bonds, and the individuals' positions in the mobilisation networks also prove to be relevant matters in the plural and contingent making of tactical innovations.
Street Scenes: The Politics of Revolutionary Video in Egypt
Visual Anthropology, 2016
Images of mass protests that arose from Egypt in early 2011 enraptured global audiences with unexpected scenes of street politics and unprecedented possibilities for political change. While the presence of thousands of cellphone cameras, perhaps hundreds of thousands, provided the technology for a multitude of witnessing, the hyper-visibility of the street in times of protest made image-making practices both threatening and powerful. The recursive rehabilitation of counter-revolutionary images happened on many fronts. Western journalists have long characterized the ''Arab Street'' as a ''barbarous urban mob'' and, despite enchantment with the ''Arab Spring,'' still perpetuated a simplistic analysis of street politics in the region. Meanwhile local television, advertising, and music videos endlessly recycled revolutionary images in superficial modes of patriotic sentimentality; while the urban poor, unable to realize the aims of ''bread, freedom, and social justice,'' have suspiciously remained the unclaimed image of the Egyptian revolution. But by attending to the social life of revolutionary street media, this article reviews the potential for emerging image practice to cultivate new kinds of political subjectivity and collectivity. LIBERATED VISUALITIES It felt like people were fighting the images that had betrayed them for so long-with their own images.
‘Arab Spring’ and the performance of protest in Morocco and Tunisia
Francosphères
This article looks at the complex interplay between performance art, protest, and political change, exploring some of the re-enactments of the so-called 'Arab Spring' in selected performances from Tunisia and Morocco. Although both countries have given birth to protest movements the political dynamic in each country is quite different. This means that the nature of 'performance' is necessarily refracted through very different prisms -revealing the 'Arab Spring' to be a less hegemonic phenomenon than Western commentators have hitherto believed.
Re-enacting Revolution and the New Public Sphere in Tunisia, Egypt and Morocco
Theatre Research International, 2013
The present paper will explore some of the re-enactments of the so called ‘Arab Spring’ in selected performances from Egypt, Tunisia and Morocco, with their seamless connections between fiction and non-fiction. Among the concepts examined are Habermas's ‘public sphere’, Deleuze's ‘revolutionary-becoming’ and Rebecca Schneider's ‘re-enactment’. The remediation of revolution in performance reveals the material conditions and geographic locations of social unrest. Significantly enough, artistic re-enactments of the revolution have already been inflicted by ‘techno-imagination’, whereby most of us have become either spectators or citizen journalists of public dissidence, and yet we have been connected to the unprecedented upheaval by watching mediated images or implementing and re-editing them for distanced audiences.
Making media public: On revolutionary street screenings in Egypt
This article focuses on two related street screening initiatives, Tahrir Cinema and Kazeboon, which took place in Egypt mainly between 2011 and 2013. Based on long- term ethnographic studies and activist work, we explore street screenings as place- making and describe how participants at street screenings knew with rather than from the screenings. With the point of departure that participants’ experiences of the images cannot be understood detached from their experiences of everything around the images, we argue that Egyptian revolutionary street screenings enabled particular paths to knowledge because they made media engage with and take place within everyday spaces that the revolution aims to liberate and transform, and because the screenings’ public and illegal manner at times embodied events portrayed in the images.