Conference Abstracts
30. Khayati, Abdellatif; Faculty of Letters Fes:
"Ali Zawa's and Casablanca's Other Spaces"
The paper will take the ‘spatial turn’
within cultural studies—the emergence of both a new, interdisciplinary
object of study and a new conceptual tool for social and cultural
analysis—as its starting point of analysis. Then it will explore
the nature of Casablanca’s cityscape and its relation to social
identities, arguing that the construction of social space plays
a constitutive role in the (re)production and (re)configuration
of social relations.
More specifically, the paper will focus on Michel Foucault’s
concept of ‘heterotopias’ to account for the heterogeneous
character of space, that is, its cultural logics of ‘emplacement’
as well as ‘displacement.’ Like utopias, heterotopias
are related to living real places, ‘but in such a way as to
suspect, neutralise, or invert the set of relations that they happen
to designate, mirror, or reflect.’ Unlike utopias, however,
heterotopias don’t have the curious property of being imaginary,
unreal spaces; they are ‘something like counter-sites, a kind
of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the other
real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously
represented, contested, and inverted.’
It is this sort of simultaneously mythic and real
contestation of the space in which we live that Nabyl Ayouch’s
Ali Zawa, it seems to me, performs. The film aims to show a group
of kids—real homeless kids—trying to survive in an uncompromising
Casablancan cityscape, where the youngest kid, Ali Zawa, wields
special energy and resourcefulness. More interestingly, in showing
this story Nabyl Ayouch’s point about the desires, the dreams
and the complaints of these homeless kids in relation to society
can best be understood in terms of Casablanca’s heterotopic
site—this other site inhabited by the outcasts—where
such normative spaces of emplacement as the home, the school, and
the workplace are contradicted, inverted and displaced. In this
film, the evocation of the margins is simultaneously real, metonymic
and metaphoric; it defines a politics of location that calls those
of us who would participate in the formation of counter-hegemonic
cultural practice to identify the spaces—the heterotopias—where
we begin the process of revision.
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