A decade after the 2011 uprisings, the South Yemeni revolution is one of the few positive exceptions in the otherwise gloomy civil society scene in the Arab World. Born years prior to the Spring out of disappointment towards Yemeni unity in areas that formed an independent state during 1967-1990, the uprising intensified during that year when all of Yemen revolted. As the war ensued and other Spring-2011 movements dwindled away, the Southern Cause widened its popularity. Alongside the Huthi Movement in the north, southerners united behind the cause have taken steps in governing territories seized from control of the impotent Hadi regime. In my paper, I will discuss the factors that contributed in making the Southern Cause a relative success story. I start from the fact that the southerners have gathered an unprecedentedly large political umbrella behind a single cause, unique in history of the area. Secondly, I study the social composition of different activities and argue that the youthful component certainly has contributed to its popularity as the young people first time since the 1960s became politicized. But alongside the youth, women’s re-entry in politics has made the revolution an all-family phenomenon that increases its inter-generational popularity. Despite constant violence, misery of war and foreign reservations, Southerners aim to continue their revolution towards re-establishment of a sovereign state. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Yemen since the late PDRY period, and most recently before the current war, I argue that the Southern Revolution has created new generational and gendered subjectivities and practices that have redefined the public sphere – and politics as a form of agency – to be open and inviting to all. While overtly public in Yemen, the Southern Revolution remains internationally silenced.

This paper studies the production of transgenerational resistance and collective memory in the testimonial narratives of dissident Tunisian families. More particularly, it looks at Je Prendrai les armes s’il le faut…Tunisie: mon combat pour la liberté (2013) a testimony by the Tunisian lawyer and cofounder of Dostourna, Dalila Ben Mbarek Msaddek, and Naẓẓārāt ʾUmmī (2018), a prison narrative by her father Ezzedine Hazgui. Between the prison narrative of the father who was persecuted under Bourguiba for being part of the Communist collective “Perspectives” and the testimony of the daughter who became a leading liberal activist during the uprising against Ben Ali is an untold story of transgenerational dialogue. This paper will delineate the main features of this dialogue by comparing the political practices of the father to those of the daughter. I ask whether Fadi Bardawil’s assessment of Mashriqi leftist intellectuals post 1967 also applies to Tunisia; i.e has the “transnational liberal discourse of human rights” taken over the discourse of radical national liberation?” To answer this question, I will analyze the scathing self-criticism and self-satire that characterize Hazgui’s prison narrative together with the overt critique of the “old left” levied by his daughter. I argue that the dialogue between these two texts is important for us to uncover for two main reasons. First, this dialogue produces a counter-memory to the official state narratives of contemporary Tunisia, and second it sheds light on the transgenerational traumas of Tunisian political families.

The October 2019 Lebanese revolution unified all segments of Lebanese society with its multifarious sects around the demand that all political leaders of different religious backgrounds must leave their offices for their failure to bring about a cohesive government, and to enact laws that would alleviate the growing pains of fiscal and political uncertainty. “كلن يعني كلن/ all means all” became the iconic chant of the protestors, but hand in hand with it came the sexually charged chants of “هيلا هيلا هو، جبران باسيل كس إمو/ Hay ho, fuck Jibran Basil’s mother’s cunt.” The insults weren’t just hurled at the Secretary of State and head of the Free Nationalist Party, Jibran Basil, but also at most political figures. Banners such as the one carried by a gay activist stating, “I am a top, then why the government wants to screw me over?” and insults are also used by gay advocates to lobby for LGBT rights. Used equally by men and women, young and old, these sexual insults sparked a controversy on social media and amongst intellectual circles with reactions ranging from satirical approval to flagrant indignation. Those opposing the use of such “crude” terms, amongst them committed feminists and writers such as Salwa al-Neimi, object on the basis of the inherently patriarchal, deeply demeaning nature of sexual innuendoes regarding women body parts and penetrative sexual acts. While supporters of the use of these sexual insults cheer the linguistic liberation from the Victorian yoke of propriety, and claim that it ushers a return to an authentic Arabic tradition where, according to al-Jahiz, Arabic language was free from sexual and political repression. They argue that such discourse exposes the fissures of pretense politeness, thereby disrupting political power and the social order. Drawing on Jonathan Culpeper’s impoliteness theory (1996), I will examine how protestors of the Lebanese and Syrian revolutions employed linguistic, pragmatic, and the social psychology of humor to advocate for citizens’ rights, LGBT rights, and to harness the affects of insult to mobilize collective power, and to demand political change.