Moroccan City Festivals, Cultural Diplomacy and Urban Political Agency
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Moroccan City Festivals, Cultural Diplomacy and Urban Political Agency Nick Dines 1 Accepted: 25 September 2020/ # The Author(s) 2020
Abstract
Over the last two decades, cultural festivals have been established and consolidated in cities across Morocco. Their proliferation has coincided with the reign of Mohammed VI, well known as an enthusiastic and extremely wealthy patron of the arts, and the concomitant state-controlled democratization of Moroccan politics and society. Drawing on two examples—the Marrakech International Film Festival and the Mawazine music festival in Rabat—this article interrogates the ways in which festivals and the urban scale combine to function as vehicles for cultural diplomacy. Contra the common tendency in recent policy debates that perceive the city (with or without its administration) as an active agent in translocal cultural relations, I argue for a more nuanced perspective that understands the urban festival as a diplomatic platform through which the cultural politics of the state are rescaled and where a range of actors contest ideas about the local, national and global trajectories of society and cultural life. Keywords Festivals . Cultural diplomacy . Urban agency . State rescaling . Morocco . Rabat . Marrakech
Introduction During the last two decades, numerous cultural festivals have been established and consolidated in cities across Morocco. Their proliferation has coincided with the reign of Mohammed VI and a concomitant process of democratization of Moroccan politics and society. The array of music, film, theatre and art festivals have showcased a mixture of Moroccan and international performers and cultural products, and have often been directly run by or received the approval and financial backing from the Royal Palace and its inner circle, the Makhzen. Drawing on local and international media coverage, festival publicity and secondary literature
* Nick Dines [email protected]
1
Department of Sociology and Social Research, Università degli Studi Milano Bicocca, Via Bicocca degli Arcimboldi 8, 20126 Milan, Italy
Dines
on Moroccan festivals and cultural policy, as well as personal insights gathered through ongoing research conducted in the field, this article interrogates the ways in which festivals function specifically as vehicles for cultural diplomacy. Focusing on two different cases—the Marrakech International Film Festival and the Mawazine music festival in Rabat—it also reflects more broadly on the diplomatic relevance of cities in a particular non-Western context. In order to begin to comprehend how festivals and their urban settings are mobilized by different actors to establish translocal relations, it is important to first distinguish between city diplomacy, on the one hand, and the role of cities in cultural diplomacy, on the other. While there may be some overlap between these two domains, they are not the same thing. City diplomacy (Viltard 2008, 2010; Acuto 2013; Curtis and Acuto 2018) can be defined as ‘the institutions and processes by which c
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