The Occidentalization of the Moroccan Cultural Status Quo between Negation and Negotiation in the Film of 'Asifa Abi'

Abstract: It's commonly argued that the Moroccan culture is a huge conceptual and performative gamut that epitomizes a set of
specific living conditions along with the way of epiphanizing and regulating their minutiae to the constant needs of the Moroccan being. It's a medium through which the individual assimilates, interprets and practicalizes a routine that adapts to the normative codes of their societal engagement, political mechanization, geographical distribution and economic investment. That's why each culture is distinguished by a sui generis quiddity that inherently depends on how individuals build up consistent convictions and aspirations visà-vis the socio-cultural milieu to which they belong. In fact, the interpretation of a particular culture can be mediated and mediatized by different platforms through which we extract different anthropological and epistemological means of difference, diversity and to some extent differentiation or différance. For instance, one of the major tenets which are highly evident and critical for such promotion is the films. Each film is considered as an imaginative and to some extent realistic gambit that illustrates the evidence of a specific human cause either in its objective, subjective or neutral means. This perspective is insistently approximated by the Moroccan film of 'Asifa Abi' where we relate to the causes, circumstances and ramifications of a culture shock between the Moroccan traditional heritage and the French modernist lifestyle. The film exposes it as modernist more than modern due to its implicit theoretical approach of different make-beliefs which can be exposed as the grand-narratives of the contemporary world. It brings us to trace a non-mimetic perlustration where the film-maker designs a comparative study between two modes of living, and thus relating their mechanical materialism and evolutionary paradigms to the audience's speculation, reflexivity and introspection. Then, this paper is an in-between engagement that deepens the deconstruction of culture as a huge liminal space where structural and ideological barricades are mainly meant to join and overlap rather than blur and fix to perlustrate the personal and socio-political criteria through which the human nature substitutes their epiphany and sensibility vis-à-vis the cosmological tendency of their ongoing life.