Online Political Satire and Practices of Cultural Citizenship in Morocco

• In Event: ICA Plenary Interactive Paper/Poster Session II
  In Interactive Paper Session: Global Communication and Social Change Interactive Paper Session

Abstract

This paper examines two satirical YouTube programs, Black Mousiba and Skizofren, to unpack the role of satire in non-democratic contexts, where the rise of the Internet has offered a space for performing cultural citizenship outside state cultural institutions.. Youth participation in the production of public culture is analyzed as a performance of cultural citizenship and, thus, a means of affecting social change. Such change is mediated by the creation of discursive social spaces of consuming and producing satire, as this social space (or public) becomes the site of forging new identities of political dissent. I argue that the emergence of the web as a participatory medium and a competing cultural form is giving rise to new articulations of dissenting political culture through the enabling of (counter)publics, and the invitation of glocal, cosmopolitan practices of cultural citizenship.

Author

• Mohamed El Marzouki, The Media School / Indiana University Bloomington