A place on the Terrace: Café Culture and the Public Sphere in Morocco -

This paper analyses processes through which informal association and insstructured co-mingling in Moroccan cafés mediate the emergence of group solidarity and subversive practices. Ther paper approaches the café not as a site of Habermasian 'ideal speech situations', but as a set of spatial practices shot through with conflicts and contradictions. The point is made that café mediated communities are imagined in the space in between the public and the private, performance and spectatorship, the explicit and the implicit, and the dominant and the subversive. The paper builds on findings of a qualitative ethnographic research to map the position of the café within the general cultural, spatial and gender politics which regulate Moroccan society. In particular, the paper explores the interface between the café and the street and examines the interaction between café communities and media texts. Cutting across these arguments, the point is made that the café institution is better viewed as a nexus where solidarities are built but also were social contradictions are played out.