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“Gender, Cyberculture and the Postcolonial Habitus during the Tunisian Revolution”
Abstract
Combining the notions of “habitus” and “colonial habitus” by Pierre Bourdieu and Vivek Dhareshwar’s with André Nusselder's discussion of the role of digital technology and function of fantasy in mediating the real and the virtual in Interface Fantasy (2009), this paper seeks to address the intertwined issues of gender, nationhood, and the postcolonial habitus in Tunisian cyber culture. With the fall of the Ben Ali regime, there was a surge in virtual cultural production that cut across age, regional, professional, gender and social boundaries. Overnight, thousands of home videos, documentaries, testimonies, songs, and political cartoons were posted on Facebook, Youtube, Twitter and Tunisian blogs like Nawaat.org, the Les Révolutionnaires de la dignité or atunisiangirl.blogspot.com--a phenomenon labeled by Tunisian facebookers as “Tunihood.” This paper will attempt to answer the following questions: What has prompted this surge in cultural production? In what way did the educational system and the technocultural sophistication help create political consciousness and a sense of national identity during the Revolution? How did the virtual world bring about a national consensus in a country torn by 55 years of regionalism and social and economic marginalization? How did humor and translation affect the reception of the Tunisian Revolution at home and abroad? What language/languages were used in these video clips? Many songs (including the anthem of the Revolution) are based on songs that originate either in the Palestinian (“Raji’ Li Blad”) or the North African Jewish diaspora (“Le Départ de Ben Ali”). What is the significance of this musical intertextuality—in language, genre, diction and authorship? What does it mean for a Tunisian citizen in 2011 to inhabit the exilic experience of the “North African Jew” in the 1960s or the “Palestinian Arab” in the 1940s? Finally, what do these home videos and political cartoons tell us in particular about nationhood and gender in post-Ben Ali Tunisia?
Discipline
Media Arts
Geographic Area
Tunisia
Sub Area
Cultural Studies