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- Convenors:
-
Alice Wilson
(University of Sussex)
Charis Boutieri (King's College London)
- Chair:
-
Sian Lazar
(University of Cambridge)
- Discussant:
-
Frances Pine
(Goldsmiths College, University of London)
- Formats:
- Panels
- Stream:
- Politics
- Location:
- Examination Schools Room 7
- Start time:
- 18 September, 2018 at
Time zone: Europe/London
- Session slots:
- 1
Short Abstract:
The panel explores how in the years following intense activism or revolution, those affected use diverse social and material forms to shape new meanings and legacies for their experiences.
Long Abstract:
How do meanings of political activism and revolutionary militancy change over time? Periods of extraordinary action such as strikes, protests and revolution dominate media and popular representations of activism and revolution. Yet it is often after exceptional moments that enduring relations, hierarchies and networks, as well as meanings and legacies, emerge.
This panel explores how types of sociality and the material cosmos in the wake of revolution and activism (re)make the meanings people attribute to militant experiences. Bringing an ethnographic lens to actors ranging from state institutions to political parties and grassroots militants, the papers examine social and material connections that people choose to make in the wake of their lives having been changed - or not changed as anticipated - through revolution and activism.
Probing the reproduction, transformation, and contestation of revolutionary and activist values and networks, we ask with whom former militants and protestors in a range of settings meet, discuss, socialise, plan business opportunities, and form intimate relationships. Additionally, we ask how these relationships and meanings are contingent upon material forms: emergent forms of public and private spaces, new avenues for mobilising resources, new vocabularies of change, legitimacy, and political belonging, as well as artefacts that are meant to embody revolution or activist agendas and their aftermath such as constitutions, new bills or transitional justice case files.
By highlighting the unstable, pluralistic processes in which dominant and oppositional reinterpretations of activism and revolution compete and transform over time, we contest teleological narratives of progress and revolution.
Accepted papers:
Session 1Paper short abstract:
Mundane socialising may help restore social worlds threatened by violence (Das 2006, Kelly 2008). In Dhufar, Oman, however, everyday sociality helps defeated former revolutionaries to reproduce a social world forged through insurgency, namely revolutionary values of social egalitarianism.
Paper long abstract:
When a revolution is defeated, what may endure over time of revolutionaries' values and aspirations for social change? This paper explores the afterlife of social relations and values associated with defeated revolutionaries by examining veterans from the former liberation movement of Dhufar, southern Oman. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted with veteran militants and family members, I argue that while veterans (who are a diverse group) no longer publicly reproduce their political and economic revolutionary ideals, in the sphere of everyday social relations some veterans reproduce ideals of social egalitarianism. Elsewhere mundane socialising helps restore social worlds threatened or destroyed by violence (Das 2006, Kelly 2008); in Dhufar everyday sociality helps reproduce a social world forged through insurgency. This reproduction of revolutionary values creates possibilities for an "afterlife" of revolution. Revolutionary ideals can be transmitted to a new generation and taken up in other contexts, as has been the case in Dhufar in local electoral leagues and Arab Spring demonstrations.
Paper short abstract:
Narratives of the "revolutionary event" among young Tunisian activists reveal the importance of assessing the post-revolutionary moment within the realm of intimate social relations. Shifts in sociality that probe gender, age, and material boundaries can be at once liberating and devastating
Paper long abstract:
For a number of young Tunisian activists turned professional civil society agents after the revolution of 2011, the timeline and duration of the "revolutionary event" in their life can be remarkably different from official narratives of institutional transformation. Contrary to the formal historicization of the revolution, these activists designate pre-regime overthrow moments of rupture with authority from inside the patriarchal home and its respective set and linear expectations of gender roles, youth activity, and economic gratification. The narratives of these moments of rupture and their intrinsic connection to political subjectivity in the present intersect the domains of both sociality and materiality. Specifically, shifts - dramatic and momentary or subtle and gradual - within social relations turn "democracy" into the object of assessment as the potential bridge between intimate and collective types of liberation. An important usually overlooked component of this assessment is the economic confidence some activists have acquired through their involvement in post-revolutionary civil society projects. This paper argues that the generational testing of democracy as a "form of sociality" (Moore 2016) in the everyday is absolutely crucial to both the quality and durability of political transformation in Tunisia - as elsewhere. The paper posits this testing as the product of three areas of negotiation over meaning: of gender, age, and economic status. It shows that this multilayered, often agonistic and potentially unresolved negotiation turns the post-revolutionary "democratic" moment into the object of unease even among those who on the outside seem to have made the most of it.
Paper short abstract:
The paper considers the contemporary dance piece 'Biz' (2014) as a dramaturgy of loss emerged in the Gezi protests' aftermath. Its touring to the Belgium-based Europalia-Turkey festival will be analysed to highlight the contradictions and shortcuts in the creative reworking of the protests' failure.
Paper long abstract:
The paper considers an Istanbul-based performance art environment to interrogate processes of group identity re-construction, re-signification and outreach after the political turmoil of the Gezi park protests. It will try to understand how a public dramaturgy of loss came to mark the emergence, as well as the failure, of a novel plural collective force which had mobilized in creative ways against irresponsible speculative investment projects and an increasingly authoritarian regime.
An intimate and embodied exploration of social bonding and vulnerability in the protests' aftermath nourished for instance Bedirhan Dehmen's contemporary dance piece, significantly entitled Biz (litt. 'We'). Through a puzzling reworking of the musical and bodily legacy of the often brutally targeted Alevi groups, Biz concretized a site for elaborating grief, thus subtly challenging the state enforced repression on public bereavements which often followed the death of some of the protestors. As a dramaturgy of loss, Biz did not only offer a meaningful horizon to reassemble after the protests, but also provided professional opportunities and political challenges.
The emphasis on loss and the body memory of resistance in the dramaturgy came however to be often textually silenced in the context of some public presentations, not only in Turkey, but even more deliberately when Biz was presented into internationally visible platforms, such as the Belgium-based Europalia festival which was dedicated to Turkey in 2015. The paper will analysis this specific event of international fruition to unpack the contradictions and shortcuts clashing at the wake of the upheaval's failure.
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores the personal, long-term transformations induced by the experience of political engagement among young activists of Morocco, Tunisia and the Egyptian diaspora.
Paper long abstract:
The popular uprisings that shook North Africa and Middle East in 2011, which are commonly grouped together under the label of 'Arab spring', are characterized by diverse outcomes, ranging from precarious democratic experiments to coups d'état and civil wars. Although many observers and participants concede that the results have fallen short of expectations, a statement one can frequently hear is also that, despite frustration, 'nothing will ever be the same again'. I move from the analysis of this idea to explore the biographical changes experienced by activists who took part in the uprisings of the 'long 2011', in order to highlight continuities and discontinuities with the forms of political socialization experienced earlier, and the personal, long-term transformations induced by the experience of political engagement. This presentation is based on an ongoing ethnography of activism in Morocco, Tunisia and in the Egyptian diaspora, undertaken in the framework of the research project Globally Sensitive: Revolt, Citizenship, and Expectations for the Future in North Africa.