Paper short abstract:

This paper argues that a garbage crisis that gripped Tunisia in the earliest days of the Arab revolutions, and uncovered a much larger crisis of pollution, became the focus of a temporal conflict between a nostalgia for the dictatorial past and a revolutionary future.

Paper long abstract:

Revolutions are temporal ruptures. In a post-authoritarian setting they can even give rise to separate temporal realities. One, intrinsically nostalgic, relies on the lingering propaganda of a dictatorial past. And another, unleashed by the revolutionary spirit, seeks to overturn this past and build a new future. While nostalgia for authoritarianism has been widely discussed, few studies have investigated how these competing temporalities shape post-revolutionary realities. Based on 15 months of ethnographic research in post-revolutionary Tunisia, this paper argues that a garbage crisis that gripped the country in the earliest days of the revolution, and uncovered a much larger crisis of pollution, became the focus of this temporal conflict. To those in affluent areas, that hadn't suffered from environmental pollution all along, garbage signified regression, backwardness, and a temporal inversion that sullied the revolution. But to those in the poorer peripheral areas, whose lives had been marred by pollution all along, garbage presented the lingering violence of Ben Ali's authoritarian neoliberalism. Waste in the revolution thereby created different temporal audiences depending on their social and spatial positioning before the revolution. The temporality of waste thereby revealed a tacit agreement or rejection of an image of Tunisia as presented by dictatorial fictions: A Tunisia that was democratic, clean and progressive, and not one that was authoritarian, polluting, and oppressive.