Item Details

The “Schizophrenic Nation”: Ethics of Critique in Morocco’s Post-Arab Spring Popular Music

Issue: Vol 5 No. 1 (2018) Hip Hop Activism and Representational Politics

Journal: Journal of World Popular Music

Subject Areas:

DOI: 10.1558/jwpm.36675

Abstract:

This article discusses popular music portrayals of collective actions like those in the Moroccan 20 February movement. Artists use the trope of Morocco as a “schizophrenic nation” to denote enculturation into two potentially conflicting value systems, but also to depict collective actions as dangerous because they encourage a break between the people and the state. The examples analysed thus effectively reproduce understandings of the nation promoted by the state. Moroccan “schizophrenia” discourse, and the subtle ways it is invoked, offers the opportunity to complicate understandings of resistant agency in hip hop. While artists critique some aspects of state policy, they may promote a quietist or normative view on others.

Author: Kendra Salois

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