Tarik Sabry

Emigration as popular culture The case of Morocco

This article explores the symbolic dimensions of emigration by enquiring into the relationship between emigration as a social phenomenon in Morocco, and Moroccan popular culture. The article critiques the discourses of unity and reconciliation inherent in analyses of Moroccan popular culture and contends that the popular in Moroccan popular culture is a pseudo-popular that speaks for the voices of the centre. This article concentrates on three taken-for-granted, non-institutionalized, popular cultural spaces in Moroccan popular culture: popular jokes, the Derb and the queue outside western embassies, and argues that emigration in Morocco is not an isolated social phenomenon, but a pervasive part of the make-up of its popular culture.

What is 'global' about Arab media?

Cunningham (eds) New Patterns in Global Television: Peripheral Vision. New York: Oxford University Press. Sinclair, J. (2004) ‘The Globalization of Latin American Media’, NACLA Report on the Americas 37(4): 15–21. Straubhaar, J. (1988) ‘The Reflection of the Brazilian Political Opening in the Telenovela [soap opera], 1975–1985’, Studies in Latin American Popular Culture 7: 59–76. Straubhaar, J. and La Pastina, A. (2003) ‘Television and Hegemony in Brazil’, in L. Artz and Y. Kamalipour (eds) Globalization of Corporate Media Hegemony, pp. 151–68. Albany, NY: SUNY Press.

Revolutions in the age of ‘globalization’: between the trans-temporal and the trans-subjective

[To] be futural means to be temporal. Here temporal does not mean ‘in time’ but time itself. But past and present lie ‘all at once’ in temporality. By contrast, what lies ‘in’ the future is not yet ‘in’ the present, let alone ‘in’ the past. However, as a being that exists as its ultimate possibility, which is in other words ‘futural’, Dasein is its own past and present. Only in this way is this being time itself. (Heidegger, 2011: 49)

On Historicism, the Aporia of Time and the Arab Revolutions

The proposed intervention is borne out of intellectual frustration and dissatisfaction with facile and largely descriptive chronometric analyses of the ‘Arab Spring’, that have failed to articulate the revolutions beyond their chaotic, unfolding eventfulness. Focusing on and grappling with key themes such as history, historicism, modernity, post-modernity, technology, art and poetics, this intervention describes key responses to the Arab revolutions and asks what it means to fight for modernity in post-modern times?

Media, activism and the new political: ‘Istanbul conversations’ on new media and left politics

Held in October 2013, ‘Istanbul Conversations’ was the first public event organized by the Social Science Research Council’s Transregional Virtual Research Initiative (TVRI) on media, activism, and the new political. The TVRI brings together scholars from a range of disciplines and world regions to examine the interrelationship of media and politics within and across ‘InterAsia’, a spatially and historically networked expanse stretching from the Middle East through East Asia. In recent years there has been much interest in media and activism, focusing primarily on the role of new media and its potential to mobilize social and political change. For the most part, current discussions explore the mediated dynamics of mass mobilization and collective action. Thus, a central question concerns how the new networks of mobile, social and digital media alter capabilities of physical amassment and amplification – the spontaneous scaling up of conversion of individuals into collective, visible, and audible

Emigration 2.0? Young Moroccans, emigration and the Internet*

ABSTRACT This article examines the relationship between young Moroccans’ uses of the Internet and their migratory project to Europe. It frames its analysis within key debates on international migration and makes the case for a more systematic exploration of the symbolic dimensions of emigration. The research conducted, (2011/2012) including qualitative interviews, focus groups and a survey, shows that although an increasing number of young Moroccans are using the Internet to migrate into Europe, the majority are, unlike the findings of previous empirical research [Sabry, T. (2003). Exploring Symbolic Dimensions of Emigration: Mental and Physical Emigrations, Ph.D. thesis, University of Westminster] have shown, less keen to emigrate. The research also shows how young Moroccans are more interested in communicating with other young Moroccans on social media than they are with young people from Europe or in other parts of the world. Qualitative material has also shown how young Moroccans’ interactions with Arabs from the Gulf, using social media, has exposed serious contradictions between profane and sacred Islam. The story that emerges is not one of heightened global or westernised consciousness, but one of localization par excellence.

On being cosmopolitan and religious: a commentary

Heba Elsayed’s idea of ‘divine cosmopolitanism’ is, regardless of the presentism in which it is contextualised,1 a fine one. I have pursued a similar, yet perhaps less sophisticated idea in a book – Cultural Encounters in the Arab World: on Media the Modern and the Everyday (2010) – in which I unpacked ‘modernness’ as a category that is alternative to ‘modern’, and which comes with predetermined, and perhaps fixed, ideas of being that have their origins in the enlightenment and the ideas of its philosophers. I have hitherto thought of ‘modernness’ as a self-reflexive, phenomenological category in which being modern did not conform to any fixed ontology – it was the self-reflexive process and not any fixed idea of being modern in the world that defined this kind of being that we call modern. My focus groups participants, like Elsayed’s, felt they were both ‘cosmopolitan’ (I used the term ‘modern’ instead) and religious. Elsayed’s piece has a dual intellectual telos. There is, on the one hand, a conscious and systematic attempt to reclaim, perhaps democratise the category ‘cosmopolitanism’, bringing it down from the towers of the flaneurs and the intelligentsia to the gritty everydayness of popular culture and the masses themselves. On the other hand, Elsayed exposes a modernist interpretation of cosmopolitanism, on this occasion reclaiming it from a fixed, materialist and West-centric interpretation of modernity, opening it to those ‘others’ for whom religion, faith and God are still sacrosanct. The qualitative material emerging from Elsayed’s focus groups proves that identities, especially those in the Islamic world, are more fluid and intricate than some would have us believe. Elsayed’s piece is also timely because it speaks to the recent globalised events which pop up chronometrically on our TV screens, press, computers and I-pads, just like a J.G. Ballard dystopia, ISIS is coming, the apocalypse is nigh. Elsayed’s essay speaks more meaningfully to the Charlie Hebdo