Dr. Said Graiouid

School

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Keywords

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Abstract

This dissertation examines the ‘nervous’ processes of communication and everyday performance in post-traditional Morocco. The thesis engages, conceptually and empirically, with theories of resistance in everyday life practices. The objective is to study resistance in its concrete and performed dimensions. A central site where this happens is the public sphere, perceived not in terms of ‘ideal speech situations,’ as Jurgen Habermas defines it, but as a set of spatial practices shot through with contradictions. Likewise, the aim is to take away the category of community from the idealized form in which it is often couched and tie it to the politics of everyday. By so doing, I hope to delineate some of the complex workings in which public space mediates the emergence of resistant communities.
The dissertation is divided into two main sections. In the first section, I proceed with a historical study to recover the potential of resistance in the public sphere theory and show processes through which communication and everyday performance mediate the emergence of a collective ethic of solidarity. The second section deals with spheres of informal association and representation: the hammam (the public bath), the café, and film. While the hammam and café mediate performative moments of concretized forms of gendered spaces and an ethics of group solidarity, film is used as a sample of the visual arts analyzed in terms of the ways it reconstructs the performed resistance of communities in post-traditional Morocco.
This study crosses disciplinary boundaries and draws on ongoing debates in the areas of critical theory, communication and performance studies, and feminist theory. The objective is to open new borderlines in the debate on the performativity of the public sphere and alternative forms of social organization.