Spectacular and Spectral Monstrosity: Morocco’s Political Field from the Years of Lead to the Present

This article examines how monstrosity operates as a cultural and political logic in Morocco from the Years of Lead to the present. It reads vernacular figures and media practices, including Boukhansha, Mama Lghoula, abduction rumours, meme ecologies and hip-hop, as an archive of everyday knowledge that encodes threat, authority and the limits of speakability before these limits are encountered in formal institutions. The article then situates the Years of Lead as a formative scene of spectacular power in which exemplary violence and disappearance sediment into public memory and continue to underwrite the credibility of contemporary control. Against this mnemonic backdrop, it argues that Moroccan authoritarianism increasingly operates through spectral modes of rule, including administrative gating and reputational discipline – namely, paperwork-based delay, selective licensing and scandal as discipline, alongside digitally mediated oversight through which legality is performed and coercion is rendered deniable. Rather than offering a sociological inventory of contemporary mobilisation, the article tracks how moments of collective visibility and episodic contestation periodically stress-test these techniques, forcing recalibration without undoing their underlying logics. It contributes to African cultural studies by linking vernacular monstrosity to state form and by showing how cultural narration and procedural governance co-produce the everyday experience of domination.