Scene in Meknes, Morocco
by Emilio Spadola
Colgate University
Dept of Sociology and Anthropology
Recently, my efforts to think on Moroccans’ quality of modern (i.e., mass-mediated) life have turned on violence both there and in the US, and, especially, to two forms of youth violence: suicide bombings and suicide shootings. In 2007 Moroccans witnessed separate bombings in Casablanca and Meknes; in separate cases Moroccan state intelligence traced other accused suicide bombers to one neighborhood in Tetouan. In the US in December an Omaha teenager with an automatic weapon shot and killed eight mall goers, then himself; four deaths shortly after in Colorado added to the long year of suicide sprees by young men: six deaths in a Utah mall in February, 33 deaths on the Virginia Tech campus in April.
Emphasizing putative differences, cultural pundits habitually link suicide bombings to the Middle East, and, specifically, to an Islamic culture of violence. And shooting sprees seem typically, if pathologically, American. They are nonetheless strikingly redolent. Yet to compare them, that is, to abstract them from their separate contexts, takes special care. In so doing one faces what Benedict Anderson calls the “specter of comparisons,†that is, the distinctly modern moment in which persons appear, like commodities and print, as serial copies. Yet it is precisely this imagined quality of commensurability—when “anyone†rather than a specific someone can be a target (of mass-mediated messages)—that marks as contemporary suicide bombing and suicide shooting. Continue reading Mass-Mediated Violence in Morocco and the US: Suicide Bombing and Shooting Sprees →
