This paper approaches the Tunisian revolution as an event that has been years in the making. It is the crowning moment of decades of collaborative endeavors across spaces, places and generations. While cognizant of this overall wide-ranging scope, I will focus herein on one enduring aspect that I think has frequently been overlooked in the many recent analyses of and commentaries on the revolution whether in the media or in academic circles. I believe there is a repository of critical dissent that has been sustained and consolidated by the insurgency of various cultural practices and the advent of secular modernity, not to mention the robust educational system that was put in place since independence. I believe there is a repository of critical dissent that has been sustained and consolidated by the insurgency of various cultural practices and the advent of secular modernity, not to mention the robust educational system that was put in place since independence. Of course, critique has not always been manifest or explicit even though some critics have quite explicitly opposed Bourguiba’s and Ben Ali’s regimes and paid a high price for doing so. Whoever studies Tunisian literature and culture since independence would not miss, however, the latent or indirect critique it carried and disseminated. Sociopolitical and cultural critique is there in cinema, in theater as well as in poetry and music. In the months leading up to the revolution, critique has become vocal, particularly on YouTube and Facebook which circulated, among other things, explosive hip hop videos that had instantaneous effects. While shedding light on the militant histories of theatrical performances and literary and poetic traditions of writing in colonial and postcolonial Tunisia, this paper will be devoted largely to an examination of the role of hip hop and film as vehicles of popular discontent against authoritarianism before and after the revolution.