World Cultural Nomadictates: An Inquiry into the Trans-local Dynamics of Music Festivals in Morocco

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to study Moroccan music festivals against the existing theories on globalization, while coming up with new concepts aimed at overcoming the problems often facing experts in popular culture and media studies who feel that globalization thesis lapses into fatal gestures of leveling, reductionism, and totalitarianism, especially when it tries to account for current discussions related to the circulation of artifacts and cultural texts. The general consensus has it that modern technologies have hugely altered the meaning and revolutionized the traditional functions attached to art and cultural industries. The grotesque circulation of western cultural artifacts is justifiably judged to be many times agonizing for theorists in cultural studies, linguistics and political science, etc who want to be sure that the unequal transmissions of products across the world will not harm local cultural, linguistic and economic capital of the less dominant other. Moroccan music festivals for instance are seen to be increasingly governed by a complex whirlpool of the far-too-melodramatic implications of today’s world global connections. In view of this, this paper, which borrows from data collected during between 2010 and 2011, will examine cultural industries, music festivals in general and the Essaouira festival in particular, in relation to world flows, while holding the argument that the appropriation of western artifacts locally has always been part of a not-so-novel process of mobility of what we call world cultural nomadictates (nomadic dictates). The paper gives a detailed definition of this concept and develops other new concepts (e.g. recurents, exclusives) related to the «glocal» face of culture and art in Morocco in an attempt to find an escape route outside the impasses of the globalization/cultural imperialism theses surrounding the study of cultural industries. To drive this idea home, we will open up the discussion at hand onto existing controversies around notions of place, authenticity, urbanism, tourism and consumption.