Abstract
This paper explores the role revolutionary South Arabia has played in the development of radical political theory in the Arab world, arguing that the experience of Yemeni and Dhofari rebels has been formative to a broader radical politics in the Arab world.
South Arabia witnessed a flourishing of revolutionary movements in the 1960s and 1970s, including the North Yemen Revolution, anti-colonial struggle in South Yemen, and the Dhofar Rebellion in Southern Oman. Informed by Third-Worldism, nationalism, and Marxism, these movements fought for liberation from the forces of reaction, colonialism, and capitalist exploitation. This paper traces a genealogy of this political tradition, arguing that the revolutionary experience in South Arabia played an important role in the formation of a political discourse in the Arab World on revolution and internationalism, serving as a site for the radical imagination’s construction of revolutionary hope and possibility.
While Arab revolutionaries often looked to China and Russia for inspiration, this paper problematizes the notion that theories such as Marxism-Leninism were for the Arab world simply second-hand derivatives of theories developed in the West. For while Mao and the Soviets certainly provided an example of revolutionary practice, Arab revolutionaries also looked to the Arabian Peninsula for inspiration. Egyptian journalists such as Gamal Hamdi and Rayshah Ma’mun wrote of South Yemen as part of the Nasserist revolution, while radical intellectuals and militants such as Fawaz Tarabulsi and Nayef Hawatmeh depicted rebels in Yemen and Dhofar in the tradition of socialist internationalism. At the end of the seventies, Syrian filmmaker Omar Amiralay traveled to South Yemen to document the continuing revolution against feudalism and imperialism. Finally, the protagonist in Egyptian author Sonallah Ibrahim novel "Wardah" (2000) can be seen traveling through revolutionary Arabia, demonstrating the continued salience of South Arabia as revolutionary image. By analyzing such intellectual and cultural productions, this paper shows that revolutionary theorizing in the Arab world was principally influenced by the historical, political, and theoretical contexts of Arab political struggles, particularly those in South Arabia.
Furthermore, the paper argues that the image of revolution in South Arabia is still constitutive of a politics of opposition in the Arab world. Through a reading of Yemen’s Southern Movement, this paper argues in conclusion that the salience of Yemen’s image as a locus of international revolution has not faded, but rather continues to play a role in shaping the discourse of opposition politics in Yemen today.
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