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Mediated Resistance: Performing Protests in Morocco
Abstract by Ms. Houda Abadi On Session 016  (Music and Performance)

On Saturday, November 17 at 5:30 pm

2012 Annual Meeting

Abstract
Images from the Internet streaming live from Morocco of human chain formations to protect national treasury, bodily performances in front of parliament to issue a political statement, and calls for change chanted in local dialects are heard loud and clear from the streets of Morocco. The rise of new media such as social networks, blogs, and YouTube has brought new changes of representation for collective memory, especially in a state controlled media country such as Morocco. The capacity for interactivity and relatively easy access has given an opportunity for the protestors to voice their opinions, share their stories, and constitute an audience that is empathetic and willing to mobilize. It impacted and redefined the public sphere by producing alternative political and social discourses, which have produced endless possibilities. In particular, this paper examines the Moroccan February 20th social movement’s mediated modes of resistance. Activists in Morocco have embedded themselves in popular culture and utilized not only social media but also performativity and moving images in demonstrations to negotiate and navigate between the different publics. Rather than adopting singular forms of protests and resistance, the groups made use of assemblage models of protest and organizing; wherein each is articulated and emphasized within the particular political and media institutions. As such, the cultural media practice of the movement revives a "Moroccan Collective Identity" that challenges nationalist and monolithic narratives. This paper traces and contrasts particular forms of mediated resistance, gender dynamics, and modes of political expressions and looks at how they are translated into virtual settings and then rendered into the spatial reconfigurations in the street. It critically draws on the relationship between offline and online activism in the creation of a democratic engagement, a global imaginary of the community and the negotiation and navigation of vernacular voices across these sites of struggle while examining dialectics of inclusion and exclusion as sites of potential knowledge building. By looking at the media and cultural practices, it interrogates formations like “the Muslim world” and the artificial binaries of “East and West.” The sites that saturate these two poles include not only the complex networks of power and politics but also the affective articulation of the local, global, and national that is animating them. Keywords: Cultural frames, Morocco, protests, Online and Offline activism, mediated resistance, publics,
Discipline
Communications
Geographic Area
Morocco
Sub Area
None