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ABSTRACT
This paper studies the role of emotions in creating spectacular revolt situations. We underline the travelling competence of sentiments and their power in crafting trans-local moments of embodied resistance. In contemporary Moroccan society, the adaptation of the Bouazizian style of protest has been a reaction to the prevailing feelings of worthlessness gripping the common citizen. The images of wasted beings in the post-2011 atmosphere have been associated with instances of social insurgence, by individuals who attempt self-immolation, or citizens treated by figures from the centre (e.g. police, public figures) in a way that inculcate in them powerful feelings of abjection, after which they feel irreparably delinked from their sense of humanity. This paper seeks to demonstrate how practices of al-hogra (humiliation) have produced cultural forms of abjection that could also be traced in the way common people inferiorize one another in everyday life through the use of a terminology of trash. By disclosing people’s non-subtle armaments of protest (i.e. self-immolation), we contend that resistance and its various trances, as well as the emotions that prompt them, have their origin in the reality of the body, realistic visions of the body owner and his/her awareness of the potential for realization (through it). Hence we will examine how vulnerable people manipulate the three conditions of corporeality, corporealism and corporealization, to subvert the humiliation and symptoms of social death imposed on them by the regime.
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers of the Journal of Cultural Studies for their highly pertinent comments on earlier versions of this paper, and for their critical interaction with our ideas. Special thanks to Professor Mohamed Yaiche from the Arabic Department at Sidi Mohamed Ben Abdellah University, Fez, Sais, for his philosophical reflections and insights on the death of the precariat and for his profound engagement with our thoughts.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes on contributors
El Maarouf Moulay Driss completed his PhD thesis on Moroccan Music Festivals in 2013. The author's academic interests span several topics within Cultural Studies, including North African Cinema, Urban violence, social movements, music and sub-cultures and dirt in popular culture. He currently holds a teaching position at Sidi Mohamed Ben Abdellah University, Fez, Sais.
Taieb Belghazi earned his PhD in 1993 from the Centre for Critical and Cultural Theory at Cardiff University where he was a Chevening scholar. He later held a Fulbright postdoctoral scholarship at Duke University and was a member of the UNESCO-sponsored International Panel on Reading for All. He was director of the Centre for Doctoral Studies: The Human and Space in the Mediterranean (2010–2015) and served as a professor of cultural studies and history of the present at the Faculty of Letters in Rabat for many years. He has also been a visiting professor at a number of universities, including Duke University; the University of California, Irvine; and the Ferguson Centre for African Studies and Asian Studies at the Open University, England. He is currently a member of the research center The Human, Languages, Cultures & Religions at the Faculty of Letters in Rabat and the Academic Director of The School for International Training Program 'Multiculturalism and Human Rights' in Rabat and Academic Director of the Multiculturalism and Human Rights (The School of International training) in Rabat. Dr. Belghazi has been a consultant for a number of projects, including the project Diaspora as a Social and Cultural Practice (The University of Southampton) and the UNESCO project on reconceptualizing Mediterranean dialogues. He is a member of the editorial boards of the periodicals Time and Society (England), Current Writing (South Africa), and Al Azmina Al Haditha (Morocco). He has published a number of writings on social movements, the politics of identity, and global/local dynamics. His current research centers on the politics of social movement and emotions. His publications include The Idea of the University (editor), Time and Postmodernism, Dialogues Khatibi and Weber (editor).
Notes
3 General non-written agreement that stipulates how people should act in urban sectors.
4 Scott (Citation1985) speaks about dance, music, stories, etc. as the hidden transcripts (weapons) of the weak. In this article, death is examined as the most outrageous form of these transcripts.
5 In one of his speeches, late King Hassan II addressed the Riffians as ‘awbash’.
6 See Bertrand Ogilvie’s l’hommejetable.
7 See Agamben Citation1998.
8 See Arendt’s The Human Condition, Citation1958.
9 Pierre Bourdieu, Pascalian meditations, Polity, Cambridge, Citation2000, pp. 240–241.
10 Ibid. p. 241.
11 As McMurray rightly notes, although the 2011 revolutions are history, Bouazizi [and his likes are] (…) not history. [They] are very much alive and memorialized.