MESA Banner
Performing the Tunisian Revolution
Abstract
The loss of the Tunisian public and semipublic spheres whether literally through land grabs by the kleptocracy, sacrifice of good jobs to cronyism and nepotism, or metaphorically in the smothering of free expression everywhere became palpably unbearable for citizens by the twenty-first century. When the pushback came, it was serious, but also imaginatively, if sometimes grimly or chaotically, performed. On the soccer pitch, in the work place, in educational venues, markets, places of worship or coffee houses, in the streets, Tunisians from various walks of life found creative strategies to publicly draw upon their own expressive culture to recover their voices and their spaces in a particularly Tunisian combination of methods. Clay Shurky writes “[chaos] is what real revolutions are like. The old stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff is put in its place. The importance of any given experiment isn’t apparent at the moment it appears; big changes stall, small changes spread. Even the revolutionaries can’t predict what will happen.” And Asef Bayat writes, “The danger can especially be more pronounced when the revolutionary fervor subsides, normal life resumes, hard realities of reconstruction seep in, and the populace gets disenchanted.” We’re collectively living through 2012, when it’s easier at one and the same time in Tunisia and in revolutionary media to see what’s broken than what will replace it. As the revolution unfolded, so did an online revolution, the two interweaving powerfully with more conventional interventions, pulling together past and present, global and local, I argue, in a process unique in many ways to one Tunisian moment. If Tunisians in their newly recovered free public spheres whether in venues on the ground, in traditional media, or in new cyber spaces can keep alive some of the enchantment of the liminal moments and continue to fashion new ones that further solidarity during the hard work ahead, those moments can contribute much to the effort to avoid the dangers of falling into all-out revolution or falling back into business as usual.
Discipline
Anthropology
Geographic Area
Tunisia
Sub Area
19th-21st Centuries