Paper short abstract:

In this presentation, I compare the years following 1969 and 2011 as privileged periods for the dialectical production and archiving of Libyan popular culture. How have these post-revolution archives affected normative conceptions of archive and documentary practice for Libyan(ist) scholars?

Paper long abstract:

Both the year in which Muammar Gaddafi took power in Libya and that in which he lost it have been narrated as moments of revolution. In the decade after the 1969 coup which deposed Idris Sanussi, the Gaddafi regime sought to naturalize its power by supporting cultural productions that narrated the emerging Jamahiriya as both outcome and engine of ongoing popular revolution. Its cultural policy thus produced archives of the ostensible popular in the form of musical recordings, television productions, literature, and the documentation of oral histories. These objects laid claim to a particular past and future, marking the borders of who and what lay in and outside the national popular. During the uprising of 2011 and after the fall of Gaddafi, digital archives of ongoing change were made and shared widely. These also made claims on who and what counted as popular, who and what was worthy of archival preservation. In this presentation, I compare the years following 1969 and 2011 as privileged periods for the dialectical production and archiving of Libyan popular culture. How did revolutionary popular culture, the notion of the popular, and the notion of revolution, as produced in and after 2011, revise the meanings those ideas carried in and after 1969? How did the necessarily differing forms of the archives produced during these periods shape their politics? In a context where "conventional" archives are scant, how have these post-revolution archives affected normative conceptions of archive and documentary practice in Libyan institutions and for Libyan(ist) scholars?