Moroccan Noir

Facing rising demands for human rights and the rule of law, the Moroccan state fostered new mass media and cultivated more positive images of the police, once the symbol of state repression, reinventing the relationship between citizen and state for a new era. Jonathan Smolin examines popular culture and mass media to understand the changing nature of authoritarianism in Morocco over the past two decades. Using neglected Arabic sources including crime tabloids, television movies, true-crime journalism, and police advertising, Smolin sheds new light on politics and popular culture in the Middle East and North Africa.

Winner of Winner, 2014 L. Carl Brown AIMS Book Prize, American Institute for Maghrib Studies.
Winner of Winner, 2014 AIMS Carl Brown Book Prize.

“"Smolin's research is impressive for its scope and attention to detail. Through archival research, interviews with key players, and media analysis, he has produced an invaluable study that will be of interest to anyone working on Morocco's recent history of human rights abuses and moves toward reform, the role of fictional writing, media, and television in these reforms, and the way that the state both controls and reacts to the shifting terrain of security and human rights." --International Journal of Middle East Studies”

"Manifest[s] years of painstaking research that come to fruition at a time when its topic - cultures and practices of policing in the Arab world - could not be more urgent for students, scholars, and commentators... Smolin fashions a new critical approach to the question of authoritarianism in the Arabic-speaking region." - Hosam Aboul-Ela, University of Houston "A very timely and well-framed book... opens up a new frontier of research in the domain of media and state... fluid and successful in analyzing one of the most powerful institutions in the country since independence even without being able to enter its secret forts." - Aomar Boum, University of Arizona

Jonathan Smolin is Associate Professor of Asian and Middle Eastern Languages and Literatures at Dartmouth College. His publications include a translation of Abdelilah Hamdouchi's The Final Bet: A Modern Arabic Novel.

Facing rising demands for human rights and the rule of law, the Moroccan state fostered new mass media and cultivated more positive images of the police, once the symbol of state repression, reinventing the relationship between citizen and state for a new era. Jonathan Smolin examines popular culture and mass media to understand the changing nature of authoritarianism in Morocco over the past two decades. Using neglected Arabic sources including crime tabloids, television movies, true-crime journalism, and police advertising, Smolin sheds new light on politics and popular culture in the Middle East and North Africa.

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