Moroccan City Festivals, Cultural Diplomacy and Urban Political Agency

Abstract

Over the last two decades, cultural festivals have been established and consolidated in cities across Morocco. Their proliferation has coincided with the reign of Mohammed VI, well known as an enthusiastic and extremely wealthy patron of the arts, and the concomitant state-controlled democratization of Moroccan politics and society. Drawing on two examples—the Marrakech International Film Festival and the Mawazine music festival in Rabat—this article interrogates the ways in which festivals and the urban scale combine to function as vehicles for cultural diplomacy. Contra the common tendency in recent policy debates that perceive the city (with or without its administration) as an active agent in translocal cultural relations, I argue for a more nuanced perspective that understands the urban festival as a diplomatic platform through which the cultural politics of the state are rescaled and where a range of actors contest ideas about the local, national and global trajectories of society and cultural life.

Event ethnography: Studying power and politics through events

“…More recently, this research has shaped a rich and diverse body of work on spectacle and (national) celebration cultures around the world (e.g. Adams, 2010;Adams & Rustemova, 2009;Chatty, 2009;Dines, 2021;Duffy & Mair, 2017;Foxall, 2014;Fuller, 2004;Gotham, 2011;Hagen, 2008;Hagen & Ostergren, 2006;Harrison, 2000;Harvey et al, 2007;Hintz & Quatrini, 2021;Hung, 2007;Johnson, 1994;Koch, 2016Koch, , 2018aKoch, , 2019aKoch, , 2022Kong & Yeoh, 1997;Laszczkowski, 2016;Ley & Olds, 1988;Merkel, 2010Merkel, , 2013Nieto-Galan, 2022;Petrone, 2000;Podeh, 2011;Rohava, 2020;Rolf, 2013;Stewart, 2021;Vaczi, 2016;White & Frew, 2019;Wood, 2011). Much of this scholarship has focused on state-led or managed spectacles, illustrating how state power continues to be enacted through symbolic and celebratory events in many parts of the world, but especially in authoritarian systems.…”

Towards a ‘new’ Moroccan capital? Democratisation, diversity politics and the remaking of national space in Rabat

“…iv As this last example suggests, the cultural role assigned to Rabat and the accompanying discourses about diversity have not been without tensions. Mawazine is one of the most contested public events in recent Moroccan history, criticised by democracy activists as a symbol of royal extravagance and attacked by Islamists for its secular excesses (Dines 2020).…”

Moving Beyond Official Cultural Diplomacy: Unleashing the Potential of Moroccan Students as Unofficial Cultural Ambassadors

“…The Moroccan state also regulates, through its intelligence agencies, the religious market of foreign countries to achieve foreign policy goals (Wainscott, 2017). Not only that but festivals such as the Marrakech International Film Festival and the Mawazine music festival in Rabat are sponsored by the Moroccan state and have been used by the state as vehicles for promoting its cultural diplomacy (Dines, 2020).…”

“…As we have seen from the literature, Morocco's cultural diplomacy is politically oriented, and it emanates either from the authority of the monarchy or from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. This policy either uses Morocco's Islamic cultural heritage or Jewish heritage (Wainscott, 2017), or Moroccan diaspora in Europe (Kaya & Drhimeur, 2022), or Cinema and music festivals (Dines, 2020), or Sufi organizations such as Tijaniyya Brotherhood (Hernando de Larramendi, 2017). This means that Moroccan cultural diplomacy still works according to the principles of traditional or official cultural diplomacy and that the Moroccan state still depends heavily on the monarchy and the official institutions affiliated with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to promote its cultural image and soft power.…”