Conference Abstracts
21. Graouid, Said; Faculty of Letters Rabat:
"Post-Colonial Interactions: UrbanCommunication Globalization,and
Moroccan Identities"
“It is in the city that contemporary popular
culture – shopping and video arcades, cinemas, clubs, supermarkets,
pubs, and the Saturday afternoon purchase Saturday night clothes
– has its home” (Iain Chambers, 1986, Popular Culture:
The Metropolitan Experience, New York: Methuen, p. 17).
This paper will explore ways in which urban communication
contributes to the construction of Moroccan identities. The paper
sets out from the premise that the expansion of urban communication
is accompanied by a re-negotiation of power positions among traditional
and emergent social players. The on-going deregulation of the public
sphere has created openings that dominant and emergent systems and
groups struggle to appropriate. What is new, though, is that contemporary
post-colonial interactions rely equally on visual, aural, oral,
and print cultures. While till the mid-eighties, Moroccans were
heavily dependent in their media consumption on partisan press and
one state-controlled television station, audiences today are avid
consumers of global TV programs, local and international print media,
and the Internet. In the last few years, the urban landscape also
gave in to the power of global capital and city dwellers are now
interpellated by outdoor advertising. In the same way, the deregulation
of telecommunications sector has brought the number of phone subscribers
from about one million to eight millions in less than five years.
As a final course, the Parliament has recently passed a law that
will deregulate the audio-visual market, a fact that will further
empower private interest groups at the expense of public service.
Parallel with this revolutionizing expansion in urban
communication in Moroccan cities, there has historically been a
traditional marginalization of communication in urban planning and
an even more pronounced failure to develop coherent urban communication
policies. Decision-makers have traditionally been more concerned
with issues of control and censorship than with how urban communication
affects social behavior and relations. Similarly, very little research
has been done to determine the dynamic relationship between communication
and urban ideology, the city and the formation of popular culture,
or the interaction between global capital and post-colonial generations.
This paper will use data gathered through a fieldwork
research conducted among university students in three Moroccan cities
to begin the task of understanding ways in which urban communication
and urban values are interrelated. The paper will also use secondary
data to trace future shifts in urban interpersonal communication.
Cutting across both objectives, the paper will reflect on the interaction
between global communication and emergent post-colonial identities.
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