Reregistering Media and Remediating a Register

Chapter three continues to analyze how Fassis understood moral literacy through an oral storytelling register of rhymed prose revamped for civic education via television: هدرة الميزان‎ hadra lmizān. From the late 2000s to 2016, a group of Moroccan cultural producers repurposed a rhymed prose form of darīja associated with grandmothers and street performers to convey “modern” Moroccan civic values. Most often this involved promoting equality for women. In doing so, they sought to make a linguistic register, rhymed prose, into a mediator of Moroccanness, shaping viewers’ perceptions of civic engagement through a nostalgic medium primed with equality content. Both Fassis and state media producers calibrated the channel shift as doing the same Moroccanness work: preserving or “revitalizing” a “traditional” form that connected Moroccans morally. And yet they understood it in different ways because of implicit and explicit media ideologies about how to relate to registers in specific mediums. This chapter challenges media professionals’ assumptions that the positive associations with this storytelling register, when linked with “modern” content and values, would be sufficient as a mechanism for shaping morality perspectives of Fassis. Instead, the viewing practices were more important for the register uptake, or lack thereof.