The Public Sphere and Satellite Television in North Africa
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The Public Sphere and Satellite Television in North Africa The Public Sphere and Satellite Television in North Africa: Gender, Identity, Critique By Ratiba Hadj-Moussa The Public Sphere and Satellite Television in North Africa: Gender, Identity, Critique By Ratiba Hadj-Moussa This edition first published 2018 Translation from the French of La télévision par satellite au Maghreb et ses publics: espaces de résistance, espaces critiques (Grenoble: PUG, 2015) Cambridge Scholars Publishing Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2018 by Ratiba Hadj-Moussa All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-5275-0367-4 ISBN (13): 978-1-5275-0367-0 For Clara For Zina TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgments ...................................................................................... ix Chapter One ................................................................................................. 1 Satellite Television: The Power of Small Things Framing: Temporal Coordinates ............................................................ 5 Diffusion and Appropriation; Law and “Raison d’État” ...................... 10 Revenge of the “Parabolés” ................................................................. 14 The Grace of the Parabolas .................................................................. 16 The Power of Small Things ................................................................. 17 Methodology: Sociology and Ethnography ......................................... 19 Organization of the Book ..................................................................... 25 Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 29 On Publics and Public Spheres: Politics Otherwise Banality and the Public Sphere ............................................................ 30 From the Megalopolitan Poor to Television Publics ............................ 36 Television Publics ................................................................................ 42 On the Public ....................................................................................... 48 Conclusion ........................................................................................... 54 Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 56 Public and Private: A "Grand Dichotomy"? The Question of Public and Private: Origin and Teleology ................. 57 Thinking Public-Private Linkages ....................................................... 57 The Houma .......................................................................................... 61 Television and the Houma ................................................................... 65 The Home, the Family, and the World ................................................. 69 Gender Relations and the Truths of Languages ................................... 82 Television, Women, and the Public Sphere ......................................... 89 Conclusion ........................................................................................... 92 viii Table of Contents Chapter Four .............................................................................................. 94 With the Parabolas: Across Identities National Belonging, Democratic Identification ................................... 96 Political Identities ................................................................................ 97 “Customs and Traditions”: The Heart of Culture? ............................. 100 Arabness ............................................................................................ 102 Variations ........................................................................................... 104 Islamicities Across Time: Openings and Closures ............................. 109 The Month of Months: Ramadan, Nostalgia, and Globalized Islam ..... 118 Identity: Past and Present ................................................................... 122 Conclusion ......................................................................................... 129 Chapter Five ............................................................................................ 131 On Ordinary Critique, or the Conjuration of Invisibility Other Critique .................................................................................... 135 On Distance ........................................................................................ 137 Passing Through Modernity: Generations of Critique ....................... 144 Confidence and Credibility ................................................................ 146 The “Flash” and Good Analysis ......................................................... 148 Visibility and Transparency ............................................................... 154 Comparison: Judging and Reasoning ................................................. 158 Intercrossing Perspectives on Satellite Television ............................. 160 All the Possibilities ............................................................................ 163 Conclusion ......................................................................................... 165 Conclusion ............................................................................................... 168 Bibliography ............................................................................................ 177 Index ........................................................................................................ 201 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The idea of writing this book came to me in the mid-1980s, from seeing the cables that came off large parabolic dishes tucked onto the balconies of buildings, stretched across courtyards and streets and passed, like vines, from one building to another, one house to another. These new intruders, which spread out across the space, didn’t seem to bother anyone (or hardly); on the contrary, they received constant attention, because to have access to the end of one was to be among the fortunate few. Today, almost everyone has their own cable and their own “parabola”, turned in the direction of their choice. Between those two moments many things and events have passed, and this book bears the traces. With the onset of the Arab Spring it seems that we have passed from one era to another. I say “it seems”, because studies in communications generally tend to follow the latest occurrences, without asking about the ways that the arrival of a new form of media can profoundly affect a society. This book hopes to contribute to reflection on the capacity of media to generate major changes in society, even if these are not immediately visible and are sometimes attributed to other causes than the media. It also proposes a deep analysis of the relationships between the “public” and satellite television in a period that preceeded the Tunisian Revolution, and helps interrogate the presentism that seriously affects media studies in the Arab world, and the frenetic need “to kill or ignore the past”, even the recent one, just to suit “the flavor of the day”—that is, just to be read and understood. This says much about our state of intellectual dependence. This study belongs to slow science, which takes its time in understanding the emergence of things and their developments. And it is also a book whose thesis argues for the existence of a television public in non-democratic societies, a public that certainly is fluid and uncertain, but which allows us to understand how the political functions and appears thanks to ordinary gestures, the everyday and “little nothings”. In short, as is said so often these days, “politics from below”. By linking analysis to theory and to description, this book shows that “small objects”, like watching satellite television, help to show what is at work in the social fabric. That said, contemporary televisual practices are worth analyzing, to show new dynamics which are anchored in national or transnational television production in North Africa, but which continue to involve satellite x Acknowledgments television. Finally, this work contributes to the study of media in North African societies, which are admittedly lacking in comparison to other regions of the world, including the Middle East. Several institutions have supported me in this project: the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the American Institute of Maghrib Studies in the USA, and the Faculty of Arts and Professional Studies at York University in Toronto. I would not have been able to access my many fields of research without the “intermediaries” who allowed me to meet the participants in this research. From Montréal, Naima Bendris arranged my first contacts in Morocco. In the field, the Bendris family, especially Khadija Bendris, welcomed me as one of their own and let me have a home from which I could extend my fieldwork and move to other sites in Morocco. I particularly want to thank the families who welcomed me in Tangiers, the Mohammeds and I’timads. François Navez-Bouchanine gave my work a new impetus by arranging my entry to worlds I would otherwise