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New Moroccan Publics: Prisons, Cemeteries and Human Remains
Abstract
Under extreme conditions, the acts of writing, witnessing, and speaking are carried on as a last resort -- not as a way to communicate among disparate audiences, but rather these are desperate gestures into the void. As innovative origins for the public sphere, this presentation considers the ways in which acts of last resort that emerge from open cemetery graves and closed prison cells resituate emerging Moroccan public spheres and plural democratic vistas. Thus, I extend anthropologists Dale Eickelman and Jon Anderson’s descriptions of “an emerging Muslim public sphere … situated outside formal state control … at the intersections of religious, political and social life.” Accordingly, the public sphere expands exponentially towards a metaphorical, imaginary, visual or even a moral space as well as an actual bounded place. I consider examples in which Moroccan political prisoners breached the confined spaces of the state-controlled cell and the cemetery through discursive, performative, and participative modalities. Focusing on the post-Hassan II historical turning point, I return to 1999-2000 when I conducted numerous interviews with Moroccan political prisoners. These encounters occurred in public spaces newly opened to overlapping communities of political prisoner associations and human rights organizations. Generations formed in prison were armed with knowledgeable analyses and organizational abilities that did indeed reach wider publics. The events of the year 1999-2000 cause me to ask: where do Moroccan claims to the public sphere about prisoner and political rights begin -- is it from inside the prison or at the cemetery, and how to document these intimate and emergent processes ethnographically? Despite regimes that criminalize all manner of cultural activities, censored literary production, and controlled sociability of cafés, Internet networks, national demonstrations, and local meetings, I discuss political prisoners’ avenues for getting the word out.
Discipline
Anthropology
Geographic Area
Morocco
Sub Area
Human Rights