Foreign Bodies, Local Language: Voicing Foreignness in a Casablanca Dubbing Studio

Abstract

ABSTRACT Soap operas have been shown to play a key role in the production of national publics. Yet what happens if the lifestyles and actors they feature are distinctly not national? This article examines the role of foreign (Mexican, Turkish, Brazilian) soap operas in producing new national imaginations in Morocco. Through an ethnography of Plug-In studios, the Casablanca recording studio where these soap operas are dubbed in colloquial Moroccan Arabic (Darija), I explore the discomfort experienced by studio employees (translators, voice actors, sound engineers) when laminating this highly local language onto visibly foreign bodies. Through an analysis of discussions between employees, I show how they negotiate this discomfort by bifurcating the national language into two registers: a neutral register that could plausibly be spoken by anybody; and a “real” register that indexes ethnic Moroccanness. This bifurcation, I argue, produces new possibilities for imagining foreigners as part of the Moroccan nation, while simultaneously keeping them at arm’s length.