Nomadictates: Staging Roots and Routes in The Essaouira Gnawa Festival

The aim of this paper is to study Moroccan music festivals, especially the Essaouira Gnawa festival, against the existing theories on globalization, while contributing new concepts (nomadictates, recurrents and exclusives, wes-turn/eas-turn modernity) aimed at overcoming the reductionism and totalitarianism of the cultural imperialism thesis with regard to artefacts and cultural texts. The grotesque circulation of western cultural artefacts is justifiably judged to be agonizing for cultural theorists who want to be sure that the unequal transmissions of products across the world will not harm the local cultural, linguistic, and economic capital of the less dominant other (Hall, 1992 Hall, S. (ed.) (1992). Encoding/decoding, Culture, media, language: Working papers in cultural studies, 1972–79 (London: Routledge). Google Scholar]). We will examine music and festivity in relation to world flows, while holding the argument that the appropriation of western artefacts locally has always been part of a not-so-novel process of mobility of what we call world cultural nomadictates (nomadic dictates). To drive this idea home, we will open the discussion at hand on to existing controversies around notions of place, authenticity, and circulation. The Essaouira festival of Gnawa music and the cosmopolitan Gnawa artist Hakmoun are employed as examples to cover the translocal dynamics of cultural nomadism, whereby humans and objects vacillate constantly between roots and routes.