Mamfakinch: From Protest Slogan to Mediated Activism

Abstract

Mamfakinch, or “no concessions” in Moroccan Arabic, was a slogan of Moroccan Arab Spring protestors adopted by an activist blogging collective emerging from that moment. Through Mamfakinch, this article examines mediated activism and processes of public formation in a global media landscape. Situating Mamfakinch at the nexus of local contentious politics and transnational policy priorities, I trace Mamfakinch’s interventions across media platforms in analyzing the collective’s discursive construction and mediation of the 2012 Amina Filali affair. Suggesting that Mamfakinch constitutes an important moment in Moroccan media’s transition to the digital, I argue that the collective taps into newly networked and increasingly worldly youth digital cultures in constructing new processes of public formation and modes of publicness. This essay illustrates what Mamfakinch can teach us about emergent digital political cultures constructed around democratic conceptions of culture that are deliberately distant from institutional politics.