Traces of Souffles: on cultural production in contemporary Morocco

2020 ◽  
Vol 45 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 305-315
Author(s):  
Claudia Esposito
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Production ◽  
Art Business ◽  
The Public ◽  
Market Driven

This article examines contemporary cultural production in Morocco and focuses in particular on how poet-artist Abdellatif Laâbi, founder of the journal Souffles, and writer-artist Mahi Binebine display ties of filiation. Bringing to light the artistic and social collaborations that these two cultural actors nurture in Morocco, the article traces a filial genealogy between Laâbi and Binebine and examines the post-independence years to reveal the spirit of combat that lies at the origin of the current artistic scene in Morocco. Questioning the link between art and the public, the article concludes by acknowledging the tension between art and market-driven concerns inherent in an increasingly competitive art business.

Public Service Media and Social TV: Bridging or Expanding Gaps in Participation?

2015 ◽  
Vol 154 (1) ◽  
pp. 89-100 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathon Hutchinson
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
National Culture ◽  
Public Service ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
The Public ◽  
Social Tv ◽  
Content Consumption ◽  
Social Media Platforms ◽  
Cultural Intermediaries ◽  
The Public Sphere

The public service media (PSM) remit requires the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) to provide for minorities while fostering national culture and the public sphere. Social media platforms and projects – specifically ‘social TV’ – have enabled greater participation in ABC content consumption and creation; they provide opportunities for social participation in collaborative cultural production. However it can be argued that, instead of deconstructing boundaries, social media platforms may in fact reconstruct participation barriers within PSM production processes. This article explores ABC co-creation between Twitter and the # 7DaysLater television program, a narrative-based comedy program that engaged its audience through social media to produce its weekly program. The article demonstrates why the ABC should engage with social media platforms to collaboratively produce content, with # 7DaysLater providing an innovative example, but suggests skilled cultural intermediaries with experience in community facilitation should carry out the process.

Modes of Feminine Resistance and Testimony in the Wake of the Mudawana Reform and the Arab Uprisings

2019 ◽  
pp. 192-224
Author(s):  
Naïma Hachad
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Production ◽  
Easy Access ◽  
Women's Activism ◽  
Major Transitions ◽  
The Public ◽  
Arab Uprisings ◽  
Collective Representation ◽  
Moroccan Women ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
Vagina Monologues

Chapter 6 analyzes Qandisha, A Collaborative Feminine Magazwine, a webzine founded by Moroccan journalist and blogger Fedwa Misk in 2011 and Naïma Zitan’s Dialy (2012), a play in colloquial Moroccan-Arabic (Darija), as exemplars of how women’s activism and cultural production reinvigorated and gendered contemporary discourses of contestation. Dialy, originally conceived as an adaptation of Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues (1996), uses testimonies collected during encounters and workshops involving a hundred and fifty Moroccan women of different ages and from different socioeconomic backgrounds to inscribe in the public sphere major transitions in a woman’s life such as menstruation, sexual relations, marriage, pregnancy, and childbearing. Qandisha has attracted a significant number of writers, readers, and commentators who post their texts in French, Arabic, Darija, and English from all over Morocco as well as from Algeria, France, and Tunisia about sexuality, rape, sexual orientation, and individual freedom. Anonymity, easy access, the dissolution of boundaries (between locales, languages, readers, and writers) have all provided women with endless possibilities for self and collective representation. This chapter analyzes the content and the reception of Dialy and Qandisha to illustrate contemporary divisions around women’s rights and sexuality in the Moroccan context, as well as the uneasy cohabitation between the Moroccan society’s diverse make-up and transnational feminist discourses and global technologies.

Liquid Labyrinths

2020 ◽  
pp. 149-170
Author(s):  
Nicholas Allen
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
Medbh Mcguckian ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Troubles ◽  
The North ◽  
Public Consciousness ◽  
Ciaran Carson ◽  
The City ◽  
Northern Star

Stewart Parker’s play, Northern Star, begins with the character of Henry Joy McCracken reciting his seaborn heritage as a descendant of Huguenots and Covenanters, his mongrel inheritance ‘natural’ to his Belfast birth, the city a port of refuge from ‘the storm of history’. McCracken is remembered now as a United Irishman who was executed for his part in the 1798 rebellion, an insurrection that lingers still in the public consciousness of the city and its past. Northern Star was first performed in 1984 and through it Parker created a space for expressions of identity and place beyond the Troubles; that he did so in metaphors of storms and sea suggests the imaginative depth of the city’s maritime attachments, which form the basis of this chapter’s readings of mid-twentieth-century cultural production in the north of Ireland, including Seamus Deane, Medbh McGuckian, Sinead Morrissey, Glenn Patterson, and Ciaran Carson.

Knowledge in the Shrinking Commons

2016 ◽  
pp. 358-379
Author(s):  
Luke Bassuener
Keyword(s):  
Open Access ◽  
Physical Space ◽  
Economic Environment ◽  
Market Forces ◽  
Self Directed Learning ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Face ◽  
Directed Learning ◽  
Market Driven

Libraries and Open Access function in a variety of ways to make information freely available to the public, but the current era of market-driven globalization has reshaped the economic environment, and threatens to undermine their principle mission. The defining characteristic of this threat is the treatment of knowledge as a commodity. The idea of open access and the institution of the library exist as sources of self-directed learning and as representatives of the shrinking commons in the face of encroaching market forces. Libraries face challenges of relevance in regard to technology, budgets, privatization, and physical space. Open Access must find ways to define itself coherently—as publishers, researchers, libraries and businesses all try to manipulate the concept to fit their needs. This chapter looks at the shared obstacles and objectives of libraries and the open access movement, and analyzes some of the efforts being made to address current challenges and work toward a future of collaboration and continued relevance.

scholarly journals Starving at the Laid Table? Journalism, Digitalization and Corporate Capitalism

2018 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Christiane Schnell
Keyword(s):  
New Media ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Public ◽  
Professional Authority ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
The World ◽  
Market Driven ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
Severe Shortage

Professional journalism fulfills an important role in modern democracies, while always standing with one leg in the public sphere and the other in the private media economy. Within the era of digitalization, the limits of a market-driven professionalism become apparent. Since information appears to be easily accessible due to new media, journalism lost its role as a gatekeeper for “what the world needs to know”. But dropping an anachronistic idea of professional authority—as reform projects within the journalistic profession demanded for decades—does not necessarily lead to a more open and participatory public sphere. On the contrary, the chance for reliable news seems to shrink in the everyday flood of information. Facing a severe shortage of professionalism against the background of an oversupply in the field of journalism might indicate a general paradox of contemporary societies.  

scholarly journals Textbooks, Postcards, and the Public Consolidation of Nationalism in Latin America

2020 ◽  
Vol 43 (4) ◽  
pp. 515-542
Author(s):  
Anna Kyriazi ◽  
Matthias vom Hau
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Latin America ◽  
Content Analysis ◽  
Methodological Approach ◽  
Public Life ◽  
Top Down ◽  
The Public ◽  
National Ideology ◽  
Market Driven ◽  
Popular Nationalism

Abstract The existing macro-historical scholarship tends to assert rather than demonstrate the wider impact of nationalism. Yet, state-sponsored national ideologies permeate the broader reaches of society to varying degrees. To investigate variations in the consolidation of official nationalism, this paper combines the content analysis of school textbooks as state-regulated and picture postcards as primarily market-driven sources. Building on this novel methodological approach, we find that textbooks published in mid-twentieth-century Argentina, Mexico, and Peru promoted a similar popular nationalism that portrayed the lower classes as “true” national subjects. However, picture postcards from the same period demonstrate that the consolidation of this official national ideology varied. In Mexico and Peru, the new state-sponsored conceptions of nationhood gained presence in public life, but they did not to take hold in Argentina. We conclude that studying the top-down nationalist messages promoted by states should not be equated with studying their ideological impact in public life.

Media, Mediation and the Vernacular Public Arena in India

2014 ◽  
Vol 152 (1) ◽  
pp. 176-184 ◽  
Author(s):  
Taberez Ahmed Neyazi
Keyword(s):  
Social Groups ◽  
The Public ◽  
Public Arena ◽  
The Media ◽  
Market Driven ◽  
Hybrid Character ◽  
And Function ◽  
Democratic Transformation ◽  
Political Negotiation

This article analyses the rise of the vernacular public arena in India and the ways in which various media have contributed to the mediation of the multiplicity of the vernacular and the universality of the public. With increasing access by different social groups to various media, space opens up for the participation of the wider public in the activities of the mediated public arena. The participation of a multitude of publics in market-driven media networks has led to a change in the nature and function of the media, which not only have ensure that they survive in a capitalist marketplace, but need to cater to a requirement to serve wider audiences. There is thus a simultaneous presence in the public arena of viewpoints and interests of the urban middle classes, along with the poor and the marginalised. This hybrid character of the public arena is often overlooked in the discussion on democratic transformation in India. The vernacular public arena is thus the expanding space of socio-political negotiation, interaction and contestation, in which a diversity of voices get mediated and remediated to reassemble and redefine the publics. The mediation has led to the subjectification of the diversity of people, but is far from consensual politics, as it often involves severe debate, criticism, oppression and resistance. This article focuses particularly on the role of the media in the rise of the vernacular public arena, and how it has helped to connect diverse social groups in a network of dialogues and negotiations, which has contributed to the democratisation of the public arena.

Regulatory Rationales Beyond the Economic: In Search of the Public Interest

2010 ◽  
pp. 38-63 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mike Feintuck
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Public Interest ◽  
Frame Of Reference ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Liberal Democracies ◽  
Political Values ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Media ◽  
Market Driven ◽  
Market Economics

This article contends that regulation in certain fields should incorporate and give emphasis to values beyond those of market economics. It is argued here that the frame of reference of the market is too narrow to encompass properly a range of social and political values which are established in liberal democracies and can be seen as constitutional in nature. Examples from fields such as environmental regulation and regulation of the media are used here to illustrate a range of non-economic values which have been, are, or should be reflected in regulatory theory and practice as a means of recognising and reflecting principles related to social justice. Such principles extend beyond, and may be antithetical to the practices, values, and outcomes of market-driven decision-making.

'Was ist aus uns geworden? – Ein Häufchen Sand am Meer: emotions of post-war Germany as extracted from examples of popular music

Popular Music ◽  
1998 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 293-309 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fred Ritzel
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
Music Industry ◽  
Political Identities ◽  
The Public ◽  
Public Expectations ◽  
Post War ◽  
The Masses

Kurt Tucholsky wrote in 1923 in reference to an old ‘Fasching’ tune of that era that this song comprised the ‘most complete expression of the German “Volksseele” (“soul of people”) that one could imagine’ and that it ‘truly reveals the day and age we live in, how this age has evolved and how we ourselves come to terms with this age’ (Tucholsky 1975, p. 187). His argument can be compared to Kracauer's thesis on the effects of film (Kracauer 1979, p. 11). He suggested that the commercial character of mass cultural production was constantly affected by what was provided in a stream of feedback: only commodities which convincingly meet public expectations on either a latent or manifest level are successful with the public. If the masses are moved by a national rhythmic feeling, then the hits articulating that feeling can be seen as a kind of national expression. From this perspective, national and political identities are bound up in the daily emotional turbulence of the music industry.

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