Geographies of Despair and Possibility in Rural Cinema: Sacred Space in <i>Jamaa</i> (2010) Between Representation, Rural Sovereignty, Religious Decay, and the Politics of Legal Exception

This article discusses spatial configuration as a domain where legal exception is enacted in a Moroccan rural locality governed by the transformative influence of sacred representation. It examines the film Jamaa by Daoud Aoulad-Syad employing the concept of simulacrum sacrum (sacred representation) and drawing from theoretical frameworks of sovereignty and necropolitics. Sacred representation of space causes a state of exception and subjugation by way of the mythology of the mosque conceptualized by the villagers who enact their belief of its sacredness in the form of a transcendence of legality. Its metamorphosis from a cinematic prop into a communal space of worship, suspended between the real and the mythical, disrupts normality and demarcations of the sacred and the profane, exerting a spatial authority characterized by the force of belief over matter yet established by the materiality of space over the ideals of jurisprudence or constitutional law. This article examines how space can be configured to appropriate a sanctimonious character to the effect that it displaces authority from the legal system to the hands of tribal sovereignty regulated by imagined representations of the religious order and the political order and subjected to the ideological domination of representative authorities (the Fqih , Lamqaddam , Lqayad , and the electoral candidate from Rabat). It concludes that the influence of spatial configuration on the construction of identity and reality, situated within a context of religious sanctity within rural dynamics affected by urban interventions, produces an act of sacred representation that exerts a state of legal exception.