Shukr? Mabkh?t’s Al-?ily?n? (The Italian), a Tunisian novel that won the International Prize for Arabic Fiction in 2015, depicts a melancholic and narcissistic protagonist who appears to be haunted by his failure to engage in left-wing activity in the aftermath of the coup that deposed Tunisian president Habib Bourguiba, as well as by the author’s melancholia and sorrow over similar failures in the post-revolutionary present. Within the novel, the protagonist’s melancholia is linked to his inability to sustain the left-wing activism that he engaged in as a student; he gradually watches his dreams for political activity fail, eventually finding himself complicit in producing government propaganda. This type of melancholia can be described as “left-wing melancholy,” a term utilized by Walter Benjamin to criticize leftists who could not move beyond the failure of their projects. This melancholia is also linked to the protagonist’s wounded narcissism (a state that Freud believed caused a loss of ego-libido, which is here an object of loss that cannot be mourned and that results in melancholia), for which he tries to compensate by asserting his intelligence, virility and attractiveness to women. However, the timing of the novel’s publication (not long after the 2011 revolution) suggests that the melancholia in the novel may also contain a second dimension; perhaps it is also the result of the author’s disenchantment with the revolution that did not fulfill his hopes of bringing about successful left-wing political activity. The novel’s setting, during another period of disenchantment and failed political projects, could then be expressive of a melancholia belonging not only to that time but also to the present. The goal of this paper, therefore, is to examine the relationship between melancholia and narcissism in the novel, as well as the relationship between the melancholia of the past, when the novel is set, and the melancholia of the post-revolutionary present, in which the novel was written.
In 2010, the Egyptian art historian Bahia Shehab designed an art installation for the Munich exhibition titled "The Future of Tradition – The Tradition of Future," a centennial consideration of Islamic art. Shehab’s finished display consisted of a curtain of Plexiglas panels, each containing a word in a distinct form of calligraphy: “la.” No. A thousand nos, repeating a refusal drawn from the history of Islamic art to articulate both the unity and individuality of protest. When la reappeared during the 2011 Egyptian Revolution spray-painted around Tahrir Square, the form changed to consist of specific refusals: no to military rule. No to emergency laws. No to the new pharaohs. This graffiti physically represents the conflict over the boundaries for the civil subject: who may speak, when, and where; what matters are sanctioned, and what transgresses. This paper attempts to detangle some of the tensions inherent in dominant frameworks for situating the art and language of political protest.
My research draws on Shehab’s written and oral accounts alongside critical scholarship on museums, street art, and the culture of the arts. I discuss how discourses in the humanities often include an implicit coding of modernity versus tradition in their discussions of protest, and in contradistinction to this theoretical trend, I assert that forms of contemporary protest critically engage with Arab cultural history. The refusal encapsulated by Shehab’s la protests hegemonic narratives of subject formation and political participation, and I explore the relationship between negation and the articulation of civic presence. My discussion of the lam-alif engages with Jean Baudrillard’s analysis of graffiti as empty signifiers. The la of the museum might be read as the anti-discourse Baudrillard describes in its refusal to name an object, thereby negating once and for all. However, Shehab’s street art uses la to protest specific events, adding an important layer of political signification. In contrast to Baudrillard’s theory of symbolic absence, I turn to feminist scholarship that emphasizes bodily presence. A situated physical act such as stenciling a blue bra on city walls with an accompanying “no to stripping the people” not only names a political demand, but also underscores the body as the site of political subjectivity.
Tunisia’s 2011 revolution came as a total surprise in a country known for its peaceful political transitions. This image was possible because Tunisia’s history of protest had been forgotten or suppressed. This paper examines the historiography of the revolt of 1864, what had been up to 2011, the largest organized rebellion in Tunisia’s modern history. It focuses on the work of Pierre Grandchamp (1875-1964) a self-taught soldier archivist working in the French colonial residency, who in 1935 published a collection of ‘unedited’ documents forming the episode’s core evidentiary record. In fact, this collection is littered with ellipses, where original text had been systematically cut out and written over. Using the source dispatches from the Quai d’Orsay, the paper reinserts deleted passages to reveal the European role in managing the rebellion and Grandchamp’s interest in suppressing the information more than half a century later, when anticolonial unionized activism was gaining strength. It places the colonial archivist in the circle of scholars who in 1893 founded the Institute of Carthage and published the colonial journal La Revue Tunisienne (1893-1948), sister publication of Algeria’s La Revue Africaine (1856-1962). With its interest in controlling native populations, especially in the Tunisian hinterland, the work produced in La Revue Tunisienne has formed the core of modern Tunisian historiography. The paper examines the implications of these textual omissions and networks of knowledge production for understanding Tunisia’s history of protest.
The Egyptian revolution and its aftermath has been commented on and researched extensively since 2011. Yet what has largely been absent from these analyses is how Egypt’s political upheaval and disappointing aftermath has affected people’s sense of self, their social relations and their perceptions of the world around them. Based on in depth testimonial research with 40 young Egyptian activists, this paper adopts a phenomenological approach that relays the deep existential crises provoked by Egypt’s traumatic political developments. In doing so, it particularly focuses on the repressive, bio-political, mechanisms with which the counterrevolution carefully and ruthlessly broke their idea of self, polarised their social and political relations and unleashed a profound sense of existential insecurity. This existential insecurity greatly impacted their everyday movements, interactions and activities and led to a cycle of destructive traumatisation with depoliticising effects. The paper argues that it is important to understand not only to understand the mechanisms with which the counterrevolution operates but also particularly the existential and traumatic impacts this has, in an effort to (re)humanise political debates on Egypt’s developments.
