MESA Banner
Reading Gramsci through Fanon: Tunisia’s Enduring Decolonial Struggle
Abstract
Scholarships on the 2010-2011 Tunisian revolution remain puzzled by the evaluation of this historical event in connection to the ongoing upheavals. Thus, the Tunisian revolution — or so-called Arab Spring — is either qualified as a success, or, it is deemed aborted and winterized, or, it is concluded that such evaluation would be premature since the revolution is still in progress. Ultimately, the analysis is trapped by the revolution/democratic transition dichotomy. This article proposes to overcome this unnecessary evaluation; and instead, to engage dialectically with the evolution of power struggles and the efforts of the subalterns to create new class alliances. This article converges the theoretical frameworks of Fanon’s national liberation and Gramsci’s hegemony, war on maneuver, and war on position to keep the focus on the decolonial struggle and its consequences. It proceeds by (1) determining theoretical concepts ; (2) retracing the colonial genealogies of the revolution (war on maneuver) and post-revolution struggles (war on position); (3) reevaluating the contextualizing the two-month Tunisian revolution as a war on maneuver and the post-revolution ‘transition’ as a war on position constantly reshaping class alliances to overcome political struggles as part of the enduring decolonial struggles; and (4) highlighting avenues for research that remain to be investigated.
Discipline
Sociology
Geographic Area
Tunisia
Sub Area
19th-21st Centuries