This paper takes as a starting point claims that the roots of Tunisian discontent lie in grievances generated by the implementation of a structural adjustment programme endorsed, and even directed, by the IMF and fellow international financial institutions. However, the paper moves the focus of study away from structural adjustment itself as a set of policy instruments and designs, and looks instead at the way in which performance is measured and appraisals made, ultimately arguing that faults at this level enable regimes to disguise their own self-interested manipulation and distortion of the reform process, with – in the Tunisian case – catastrophic consequences. The paper starts by reviewing the results of the economic reforms implemented under the Ben Ali regime as they were presented over time, and the arguments of the IMF that Tunisia was a regional role model, a success story for neo-liberal restructuring. Such arguments proved ultimately to be substantially incorrect. The Tunisian uprising reflected a growing crisis of unemployment, price inflation, poverty, inequality and corruption. Investigating the discrepancies between the international portrayal of the economy, and the realities as they were lived by the Tunisian population, unveils both the flaws in the way in which the international financial institutions measure success, and the manner in which regimes can manipulate and disguise the data which informs their judgements. More crucially, it shines light on the hidden stories of economic liberalisation under authoritarian regimes and the manner in which the instruments of reform translate into distortions and subversions of the very agendas they supposedly seek to promote. Ultimately the Tunisian story enables us to shed light on the roots of popular discontent in order to prepare for a more contextualised discussion of the origins of dissent.

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.

My paper will examine Arabic literary criticism in the early decades of twentieth century Tunisia as a fertile area of political, social and cultural dissent against both an archaic Arabo-Islamic patriarchal tradition and a racist and hegemonic French imperialism, especially in the expression of the 'Latinist' movement. My contention is that the leading intellectuals of the time established a powerful paradigm to articulate a nationalist movement for a modern Tunisian state, and that many of the constituent parts of this paradigm remain in place today. Departing from Abu al-Qasim Shabbi's notorious lectures renouncing the influence of Arabic literary tradition and all other forms of tyranny, Tunisian writers of this generation aggressively challenged the assumptions of established literary history and western style criticism to stake their claim in reforming Tunisian society. My presentation will treat some of the seminal writings of Ali Du'aji, Zin al-Abdin al-Sanusi, and the Egyptian born Mahmoud Bayram al-Tunisi, founding members of the Taht al-Sur Group of artists and writers who flourished in the thirties and forties. In their capacity as journalists and public intellectuals,and spanning a wide spectrum of political stances toward the critical issues of their generation, they manipulated the Press- much like the Internet of our own times- as a effective weapon of resistance to both the colonial authorities and their Tunisian supporters to win over public opinion and raise the social consciousness of the masses. Their critical writings and literary scholarship, I will argue, guided a new urban readership to the issues and debates that raged throughout the Arab World during much of the colonial- and postcolonial- period.

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.