Abstract
This book is a radical intervention in understanding Moroccan digital culture. From the outset, it offers a crucial methodological lesson by demonstrating that Moroccan reality is too complex to be studied through isolated phenomena, rejecting the traditional academic methodology of a single case study, choosing instead to embody the fractured reality it describes. This decentralization justifies the focus on multiple themes, each reflecting and distorting the Moroccan everyday – revealing its horror, grotesque twists and resistance to monolithic interpretations.
A naïve reader might be tempted to dismiss this book as yet another attempt to map the world, jumping from one phenomenon to the next – art, politics, music, literature, activism, feminism – as if to capture everything at once. But this is precisely the wrong-est reading. The true conceptual move is to grasp the very monstrosity at play here: not as an object to be described, but as an active force that invades the very form of writing itself. But Almeida’s method is as much a critique of form as it is of content. Such an undertaking requires no neat synthesis of topics; it is a work that enacts the horror it seeks to confront. In the Moroccan context, where the cultural and political textures twist into each other in grotesque forms, the monstrosity cannot merely be depicted – it must be performed. The book does not just represent the monster; it is the monster. This experimental form(ula) is crucial to the book’s impact, as it refuses any sense of resolution or order.
Almeida studies a convoluted convergence of phenomena that Cultural Studies researchers often study in isolation, tactically analyzing them in connection to one another, under the conceptual guise of a triangular monstrosity comprising horror, the grotesque and trash; these manifest primarily in the uncanny poetics of Darija as a modality of self-articulation, a fractured interstice suspended between Arabic and French – yet fully neither. Darija surfaces through an inescapable vulgarity, a language at once wounded and defiant, becoming the language of profanity (in rap, politics and beyond), a language that makes of politeness itself its first casualty. Monstrosity also features in the provocative music of C H E B, the daring dancing of Shikhat, the reverberations of the Arab Spring, the narratives of rural and urban feminists, the sub-cultural styles of tcharmil, the erotics of Routini Al Yawmi, the system’s scare tactics, the monarchy and nostalgic memory, the red pill allegory and in the local folkloric and mythological monsters, beasts and zombies.
Besides, the book masterfully tackles the question of paternal authority, caught in the liminal space between the rule of Hassan II and the present reign of Mohamed VI, framed through the prism of digital nostalgia and Derrida’s hauntology. What we encounter here is not a longing for the ‘good old days’ of the 1980s and 1990s, but a deeper, almost pathological yearning for a future that was promised yet never materialized – a future that was stolen before it could be had. This explains why Cultural Studies in Morocco cannot eschew this epistemic pessimism. On the web, this pessimism gives birth to a meme culture that renders the horror of discontinuity in dark comic gestures; the meme becomes the moment and the event of hysteric laughter: one laughs out of the realization that the future, far from being bleak, is unavailable. This can be construed alongside to reflect the term al kamahiyatiya (asitism), which we use to describe a nightmarish reality steeped in stagnation, decay and waithood – a state where even the future seems suspended, endlessly awaiting its own futureness (El Maarouf et al., 2024).
The book’s originality lies in its postmodern methodological surrealism, reminiscent of Gregory Abbott’s Remlack Too, which converges a myriad of disparate elements into a single, disorienting spectacle. Like Abbott’s frenetic tableau – where a life-size Chinese clay horse cohabitates with a Renaissance canopy bed while contemplating a reproduction of Fuseli’s The Nightmare – Almeida’s work enacts a similarly disorienting synthesis, binding together varied components into an overwhelming, grotesque whole.
Yet, this innovative structure could challenge readers unfamiliar with postmodernist or experimental writing. The book does not merely catalog the underlying forces at play in Morocco’s digital everydayness; it rather reads them through a battery of concepts, such as memory, nostalgia, time, precarity (freedom of speech), affect (i.e. Hogra; anger), resistance (i.e. social movements, the Rif Hirak) and the abject (i.e. the socio-cultural dynamics of dirt). All these threads coalesce to underscore the grotesque less as a random reality, more as a marker of the present conjuncture (Hall, 1979), as a mode of critique and as a means to unravel the latent contradictions, excesses and predicaments of the ‘now’. Like a Conradian double, it emphasizes ‘the horror, the horror’ of the webosphere – an unflinching gaze into the terror that emerges from the virtual abyss.
The Moroccan digital landscape is a conundrum of puzzlement, intrinsically aporetic, fundamentally obscene and essentially disturbing. Horror does not merely manifest as the panic instilled by the digital real(m); rather, it epitomizes the profound absence of cognitive clarity, the lucidity that is required to think (about) and make sense our freakish contemporaneity. The most profound horror resides hence in the disconcerting absence of a suitable language capable of capturing its full extent. Facing this monstrosity, the book resonates as a scream in the Munchian tradition, an embodiment of what persists when language disintegrates and utterly fails to grasp the chaotic reality that confronts us. This finds its most unsettling expression on the Moroccan web – through memes, where laughter, far from being mere humor, serves as a form of symbolic expulsion, a vomiting out of the very reality it subjects to ridicule. These memes, in their vulgarity and absurdity, enact a visceral rejection of the prevailing truth (Bakhtin, 1984). The grotesque here is not merely an aesthetic, but rather a symptom of the contradictions of our modernity, a sign that reveals the obscene underside of our sociality.
And, of course, this culminates in the book’s conclusion: the need to eschew an epistemic horror through the call for a new approach to digital cultural studies, one that does not impose Western theoretical frameworks on non-Western digital phenomena. This book is an epistemic vomit hurled at the face of those entrenched in the old guard of Western pedagogy. In this sense, the book confronts not just the digital grotesque but also the ideological horror of academia itself.
In reading the Moroccan web, Almeida’s book does not simply invite you to explore – it drags you, kicking and screaming, through the dark corridors of the digital/real. For researchers bold enough to face this monstrosity, Almeida offers nothing less than a generous invitation to conceive a monster theory on Moroccan culture and politics. Almeida’s exploration of Moroccan society through the lens of monstrosity represents a significant intervention in Cultural Studies within Morocco. Her work enriches the ongoing theoretical and thematic debates we have initiated (Belghazi and El Maaroufs) regarding precarity, monstrosity and abjection. This anthology’s expansive scope, much like its monstrosity, is also its greatest asset – inviting a wide audience to be jolted out of their comfortable assumptions about Moroccan culture.
