How does a city recuperate a sense of “the public” after civil war? What institutions and imaginaries need to be in place to allow for public co-presence to resume after such trauma to the social body? This paper examines one city block in Oran—Algeria’s second-largest city—that planted the seed for a "public of the future" just as the 1990s civil war, or the Black Decade, began. This inconspicuous street houses three organizations behind unassuming façades: Bel Horizon (Beautiful Horizons), AFEPEC (Feminist Organization for the Blooming of People and the Exercise of Citizenship), and Petit Lecteur (Littler Reader). Each organization seemed to anticipate the hard work ahead: preserving the decaying city, protecting women’s place in public, and carving out spaces for children. Their co-presence on this single street presupposed and entailed an alternative future beyond the fratricidal unraveling of the 1990s. Through in-depth interviews and participant observations with these organizations during sixteen months of ethnographic fieldwork in Oran, I argue public co-presence in post-civil war urban spaces encompasses a material practice of becoming in the everyday. Seemingly ordinary practices can enact alternative futures: a children’s story hour in a public park taken over by ‘delinquents;’ a public march through the forest of Les Planteurs, a former hideout for Islamist militants during the Black Decade; a coed coffee break at a café typically reserved for men only. These micro-acts of recuperating “the public” show how the future public is created by performing co-presence in spaces vacated by civil war. At work is the everyday practice of envisioning and performing the future, even when all signs point to its foreclosure.

Beginning in the 2000s, the Moroccan public began to experience a political and economic shift that redirected the country away from the Arab world in the east and instead towards the African continent to the south. This regional shift has involved, amongst other things, growing economic investments in sub-Saharan African countries, the political reintegration of Morocco into the African Union, and growing numbers of West Africans working and studying in Morocco. In this paper, I explore how this larger political and economic shift towards Africa has impacted ordinary Moroccans. How do ordinary Moroccans experience their government’s growing emphasis on Morocco’s "africanité"? Do Moroccans see themselves as “African” and, if so, what does that mean to them? How are these larger shifts shaping their relationships to the growing population of West African immigrants? To answer these questions, I turn to a unique site: Moroccan women’s hair practices. Moroccan women have long engaged in hair practices associated with African and black diasporic communities. Whereas straight styles, achieved with chemical products or styling tools, used to be the norm in major cities like Casablanca, growing numbers of Moroccan women are “rediscovering” their kinky, afro-textured hair and adopting “natural” hair styles, often with the help of international online communities that show them how to do the “big chop” and “transition.” Through ethnographic fieldwork with Moroccan women in Casablanca, as well as local hair salons and hair product companies that are cashing in on this trend, I investigate the emergence of a new, hair-based counterpublic. This “capillary public,” I argue, allows for new forms of mutual recognition amongst a certain segment of Moroccan women, as well as an important site for them to collectively reconceptualize their relationship to African and black diasporic communities. Yet even as this emergent “capillary public” is expanding Moroccan women's sense of their own Africanness, I suggest that so far it has been less successful in bridging the gap between them and their West African immigrant counterparts, who are still largely seen as racial and cultural “others” engaging in “different” hair practices.

The expression “the people” (الشعب / ash sha’b) is a recurring element in protest chants in Arabic, such as the one used during the Arab Spring (“the people want to overthrow the regime”). In this presentation, I study the “people”, both as a popular term to refer to a unified group of individuals and as a specific socio-historical category brought to life through repeated performative citational acts. Following recent pro-Palestinian actions in Morocco, this paper turns to the performative practices and mediation of Moroccan publics at pro-Palestinian rallies to analyse how certain practices produce and transform the broader notion of “the people” in Morocco. Today, the pro-Palestinian movement in Morocco denounces Zionism and the ongoing genocide committed by Israel and rejects the recent normalization accords signed between Morocco and Israel in 2020. At most rallies, one can read or hear the same following chants in Arabic: “the people want to end normalisation”, “down, down with the Zionists and Americans”, and “The door of Al-Aqsa is made of iron, only a martyr can open it”, and lastly “Free Palestine!” in English. I ask: Who are “the people” that are (re)cited and presenced at pro-Palestinian rallies in Morocco today? What performative acts produce and transform the senses and scale of “the people”? To what effects? To answer these questions, I present my observations on the communicative practices of three “minipublics” (Warner 2002, Wedeen 2008) constitutive of the broader “people” at Moroccan rallies: 1) the public re-enactment of powerful “scenes” of Palestinian suffering and resistance; 2) the call-and-response between a leader and the smaller crowd following them; and 3) reactions to chants and images as individuals talk during downtime. While these acts may appear to perform a homogeneous perspective at first glance, I argue that it is the opposite. The diversity of poetic images and relationships evoked by the chants, the regular juxtaposition of Arabic linguistic varieties and English, and the juxtaposition of religious, political, and theatrical speech genres, lead me to argue that the participants perform “the people” as a deeply syncretic and collective subject formation. These syncretic practices open up multiple overlapping senses of solidarity. Through this presentation, I hope to expand on the way in which tracing the co-occurrence and juxtaposition of minipublics helps understand broad social movements led by “the people”.

In this talk, I will provide an ethnographic investigation into Turkey’s increasingly digitized publics under Erdoğan’s authoritarian populism. Over the last decade, Turkish nationalism has adopted a curious expressive form: Citizens who identify as ‘Turks’ proudly boast of being ‘the most engaged nation on the Internet’ – swarming online polls, forums, comment pages to defend the nation in the new emerging online frontier. In line with authoritarian politics elsewhere, these new publics are composed of a nexus of digital-phantomic – troll armies, bots - and real citizens (Cesarino and Nardelli 2021; Maly 2019; McIntosh 2022). I ask: How are these authoritarian, post-truth publics produced through human and digital-phantomic persons? I provide some preliminary answers by analyzing what in Turkish media, politics and juridical reasoning is referred to as ‘perception operations’ [algı operasyonları]. Part-conspiracy and part-truth, these operations are framed by the government as illicit participation and contribution to public discussion that can lead to defamation, online doxxing, and criminal adjudication. My discussion revolves around data culled from online ethnography and mainstream media of three instances that expose the slippery ground of authoritarian populism (Mazzarella 2019): First, the exposure of Pelikancılar [the Pelicans], a palace-funded group that built a pro-government troll army to shift Turkish public opinion in times of crises, which led to a reframing of what ‘public funds’ and ‘public benefit’ stands for; second, accusation and defamation against citizens self-reporting from the earthquake-affected regions in the first month following the 2023 Earthquake; third, the public incitement of fear towards Syrian and Afghan refugees by far-right populist collectives that have led to instances of public assault and violence against migrants. Finally, I suggest ways in which classic anthropological concerns around public ritual, sacrifice and scapegoating can be used to more comprehensively understand the emerging digital tools of populist governance: troll armies, algorithmic and bandwidth control, filter bubbles, and the production of fake news. Works Cited Leticia Cesarino and Pedro Nardelli, “The Hidden Hierarchy of Far-Right Digital Guerrilla Warfare,” in Digital War 2 (2021): 16-21. Ico Maly, “New Right Metapolitics and the Alrogithmic Activism of Schild & Vriendedn,” in Social Media + Society 2 (2019). William Mazzarella, “The Anthropology of Populism: Beyond the Liberal Settlement,” in Annual Review of Anthropology 48(1) (2019): 45-60. Janet McIntosh, “The sinister signs of QAnon: Interpretive agency and paranoid truths in alt-right oracles,” in Anthropology today 38(1) (2022): 8-12.