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- Convenors:
-
Valerie Haensch
(Anthropological Museum Berlin)
Serawit Debele (University of Bayreuth)
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- Discussant:
-
Rama Salla Dieng
(University of Edinburgh)
- Format:
- Panel
- Streams:
- Anthropology (x) Futures (y)
- Location:
- Philosophikum, S73
- Sessions:
- Friday 2 June, -, -
Time zone: Europe/Berlin
Short Abstract:
In this panel, we seek to move beyond narratives of institutional failure or success of recent revolutions in Africa. Instead, we ask how revolutionary subjectivities are projected into the future and how revolutions are kept ongoing against counter-forces by attending to creative practices.
Long Abstract:
Popular uprisings in Africa during the last decade have often been organized at the grassroot level by youth, workers, artists, and others who act outside the conventional political space. Using civil disobedience, creative practices of protest and developing political imaginations that shaped revolutionary change, these movements challenged existing arrangements of power and set out to build alternative ways of being and society. However, these revolutionary movements are often seen as having failed with regard to democratic change. Recent debates, such as Elamin (2020) and Zeleke/Davari (2022), invite us to view revolutions as protracted processes that go beyond regime change and include the creation of new ways of live, identities and political belonging which provide huge potentials for future political struggles. Moving beyond conventional political perspectives of power transfer in political institutions, we seek to question the narratives of failure or success by looking at the emergence of political subjectivities through creative practices and everyday resistance. We ask: How do these practices defend and keep the revolutions, their possibilities and imaginations, ongoing against counter-forces? What kind of subjectivities and identities emerge in this process and how are feelings of frustration countered in the ongoing revolutionary process? In which spaces do resistance and creativity occur and what new social spaces are created? We invite co-thinkers to rethink revolutions by attending to experiences and creative practices of resistance that defend revolutions and in turn shape political belonging, subjectivities and social identities.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Friday 2 June, 2023, -Elizabeth Cooper (Simon Fraser University)
Paper short abstract:
Students have acted together to set hundreds of fires in secondary schools across Kenya. They explain this arson as protest (i.e. ‘strikes’) against unjust practices of authority over their lives. This paper considers how students’ strikes, including arson attacks, affect political subjectivities.
Paper long abstract:
Students have acted together to set hundreds of fires in secondary schools across Kenya. They explain this arson as protest (i.e. ‘strikes’) against unjust practices of authority over their lives. This paper considers two ways of understanding how students’ collective contentious actions, including arson attacks, affect political subjectivities. First, I examine how young Kenyans remember their experiences of participating in school strikes, including arson attacks. Second, I consider how students’ strikes are debated in Kenyan public discourse. Students’ personal narratives reveal the profundity of their strike experiences specifically, and secondary school experiences more generally, in the formation of understandings of how power is organized hierarchically and violently in Kenya as well as the impoverished potential for collective protest actions in Kenya. On this basis, I argue that school strikes contribute to the formation of young Kenyans into cynical and docile political subjects. However, public discourse reveals more ambivalence; while students’ strikes are condemned as irresponsible and dangerous, they are also understood as justified because students’ more peaceful appeals are neglected. I argue this ambivalence signals enduring public acceptance for students to rebel against injustice and overly authoritarian governance.
Saskia Jaschek (Bayreuth International Graduate School of African Studies)
Paper short abstract:
This paper examines affective commitments and emotional attachments in the Sudanese revolutionary movement and their influence on youth participation in street protests against a military coup. It investigates how emotional bonds lead to resistant practices and how they are, in turn, shaped by them.
Paper long abstract:
This paper identifies conditions for continuous collaborative, cooperative street action to counteract state oppression by exploring the emotional dimensions of resisting the military coup in Sudan and the commitments and loyalties that arise from these. It addresses the cultural and temporal embeddedness of prevailing political emotions emerging among protestors and their linkage to the persistence of the resistance.
The findings of this paper are based on eleven months of ethnographic research in Khartoum in the context of a military coup d’état, which included various data collection methods such as interviews, group discussions, and extensive participant observation, especially at the protests. As part of a dissertation project about the different forms of subjectivation of resistance among the youth members of the revolutionary movement, the paper will examine the affective commitments and emotional attachments emerging within the movement and their dialectic relationship with locally circulating discourses, power relations, and practices of resistance.
The paper shows how the revolution’s objectives, as communicated by different revolutionary sub-groups, have been individually and collectively internalized and function as guiding and regulating background emotions. Furthermore, it portrays how moral and normative demands place the resisting subjects within a distinct social order and command a particular behavior through affective commitments.
Finally, it will explore how these affects and emotions partake in the production, appropriation, and alteration of resistant political subjectivities among the protestors in what they see as “the next chapter of the continuing revolution”.
Sheila Orero (University of Bayreuth)
Paper short abstract:
This paper examines Kenya's revolts throughout history, from independence to democratic struggle. It looks at the evolution of revolution, from bloody eras to Kenyans' inventive ways of protesting oppression, abuse of power, and corruption, necessitating a time and space redefinition of revolution.
Paper long abstract:
‘The blood of patriots and tyrants must be sprinkled on the tree of liberty from time to time.’ (Thomas Jefferson) This was the unwritten constitution of most revolutions around the world when weapons and bloodshed were allowed on the battlefield. In the 1950s, Kenya needed political liberation, so the battleground was Mt. Kenya and the Aberdares forest areas, manned by armed revolutionaries (Newsinger 1981).
Kenya changed its laws after gaining independence. This sparked widespread outrage among students, the opposition, and civil society, even leading to an attempted political coup. Kenyans gained freedom of expression with the adoption of a new constitution, which they use on a daily basis to combat oppression. As a result, the Kenyans On Twitter Army emerged, which is a virtual platform that quickly grew in popularity due to a large number of Twitter users. All Kenyans with internet access and a Twitter handle can participate in this type of battleground. This has been a very active and effective anti-oppression platform, with a plethora of online discussions ranging from social, political, and economic issues (Okoth 2020). Kenyans have mastered the act of investigating and providing evidence online in order to expose Kenya's injustices.
This army is known for its unwavering pursuit of solutions, even if it means bullying and trolling individuals to some extent. KOT has resulted in some changes in oppression, such as the investigation and arrest of perpetrators like rough cops, politicians, and civil servants.
Valerie Haensch (Anthropological Museum Berlin)
Paper short abstract:
In this paper, I explore how members of the revolutionary movement in the Sudan remain committed and passionate about it in the aftermath of the 2021 military coup by focusing on creative practices of commemorating the martyrs and the affects and moral bonds associated with them.
Paper long abstract:
In October 2021 the transitional government in Khartoum was overthrown by a military coup, seriously challenging the revolutionary movement and its aspirations of freedom, peace and justice. The road to democratic elections and democratic government, paved since the start of the so-called December Revolution in 2018, has stalled. Since then, weekly protests against the coup and everyday resistance have been met with unprecedented violence and repression by the military and security forces. Confronted with setbacks, violence and death, a sense of frustration is increasingly spreading among the members of the revolutionary movement, hampering efforts to maintain a sense of change and possibility. In this presentation, I examine creative practices of resistance that generate moral commitments and affective resonance among the revolutionaries. I focus on practices of mourning, commemorating and honouring the protestors killed in the demonstrations and analyse how martyrs are imagined and cultivated, but also contested. Slogans about martyrs fill revolutionary poems, songs, wall writings and murals. Funerals turn into demonstrations, attended by hundreds of people. I shall argue that commemorative practices such as rituals, performances, murals, banners and slogans play a central role in the political affection. Drawing on ongoing ethnographic research in Khartoum, I show how these practices are imbued with affects of loss, love and care. In turn, they create feelings of political belonging and moral obligations to continue the struggle for a new Sudan.
Samira Diebire (University of Essex)
Paper short abstract:
While revolutions are temporary unifying moments, once the momentum of a revolution is lost, this loss will be experienced in different ways across different groups. These differences are shown in their demands and their expectations that quickly change as the revolution phase passes.
Paper long abstract:
While revolutions are temporary unifying moments, once the momentum of a revolution is lost, this loss will be experienced in different ways across different groups. In Burkina Faso, like many other African states, the focus on group identity is essential because ethnicity is one of the primary organising principles of post-colonial politics (Mamdani, 2001). Even during unifying moments like an uprising, these differences are shown in their demands and their expectations that quickly change as soon as the revolution and the transitional phase passes. I therefore examine the relationship between ethnic group identity and political expectations. To do so, I expand Davies' J-Curve Theory. First, I move away from the single curve of Davies' theory. Second, I extend the curve beyond the outbreak of the revolution to revolutionary and post-revolutionary periods - necessary for my paper. Third, the relationship between met needs differs from group to group - while groups that have always had power expect them to keep on improving, smaller groups adjust expectations to circumstances. Finally, if the gains of the revolution are lost (e.g. election of Kaboré) then the expectations/needs gap will start to emerge again among the groups in the post-revolutionary era.
Jihad Alfakir
Paper short abstract:
Drawing on my research on the subject of sexuality, this presentation analyzes emergence of Queer activism in Tunisia so as to understand the trajectories of the revolution from basic economic demands to sexuality as a political category.
Paper long abstract:
When we look back at the 2011 Tunisian revolution, we cannot neglect that it needed a self-immolation of the body as trace of injustice to inflame the masses. In addition to this embodiment of the revolution, another marker of this uprising is the emergence of demands related to sexuality. As part of the demand for change, queer activists called for the removal of laws criminalizing non-normative genders and sexualities. They also established different Queer organizations in the post-revolutionary Tunisia as actors within the larger Tunisian civil society. In their advocacy and community building, queer activists speak of “Queer revolution”. Drawing on my research on the subject of sexuality, this presentation analyzes emergence of Queer activism in Tunisia so as to understand the trajectories of the revolution from basic economic demands to sexuality as a political category. In order to appreciate what is meant by queer(ing) revolution, the talk also looks at how curating cultural events and cultural productions play a role in the expansion of the revolutionary moment beyond normative bodies and times. I will show that queering the revolution does not only sustain the revolutionary flames like in the struggle to decriminalize non-heteronormative sexualities, but also stretches the revolutionary aspirations as well as the meaning of justice. If Bouazizi’s body sparked the revolution, the fire is carried in the dreams, imaginations and practices of freedom by queer Tunisians.