No Concessions: Independent Media and the Reshaping of the Moroccan Public

Abstract

Communication scholars attending to globalization increasingly look to the local as an articulation of how societies transform and are transformed by capital and communication technologies associated with globalization. This dissertation analyzes how the emergence of independent media in Morocco has remade the link between culture and politics in an era defined by economic liberalization, political transition and cultural globalization. Once the domain of the state and the monarchy, culture – understood as everyday, lived experience – has been re-mediated through magazines, film and various digital media platforms and practices. This project engages with media industry studies and cultural politics in examining three distinct, yet interconnected, sites of mediation: the newsmagazine Telquel, new Moroccan cinema and activist blogger collective Mamfakinch. Using thematic textual analyses, in-depth interviews and participant observation, I track cultural and political tensions as they play across these different mediated sites, signaling foundational shifts in Moroccan public culture and the emergence of a distinct new arena of socio-cultural and political interactions. Independent media use the forces of capital and technological affordances to create these new discursive spaces within a broader Moroccan media landscape. In doing so they act as a platform for a progressive counterpublic to advance a set of values associated with individual rights and secularism while countering the political power of the monarchy and the Islamist PJD. They generate interventions around language politics, alternative information infrastructures outside the purview of the state and new modes of publicness characterized by what I call flexible publics, or groups groups that coalesce around particular issues, operating outside institutional politics to assert claims in public and provocative ways. Ultimately, by engaging with the lived realities of contemporary Morocco, independent media both participate in Morocco’s entry into global modernity and display a fundamental ambivalence toward modernities caught between increasing global inequality and the neoliberal authoritarian state.