Events of citizenship: Left militantism and the returns of revolution in Tunisia

ABSTRACT

Amidst an ostensibly successful transition along the axes of liberal parliamentary democracy since the 2011 revolution, a group of Tunisian left militants organize their own spaces of deliberation and ethical cultivation. Among these is the ciné-club, an assembly that combines film screenings and discussion. By unearthing the diverse chronotopes – temporal and spatial dimensions – of Tunisian revolutionary thought and praxis, the ciné-club assembly disrupts hegemonic understandings of liberal citizenship. By virtue of this disruption, the assembly constitutes an ‘event of citizenship’ that exposes not only the long legacy of protest in Tunisia, but also the diverse understandings of revolution and democracy among the Tunisian citizenry today. The returns of local and global revolutions in the Tunisian present offer us the opportunity to delve into the intricacies of the social life of left political thought and praxis.

KEYWORDS:

• Event
• citizenship
• revolution
• democracy
• ethics
• generation

Acknowledgements

My warmest thanks go to the Tunisian activists, younger and older, who made this research possible. The life of this paper began at the John Harvard workshop in Cambridge during my visiting fellowship at the Center for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities (2018-2019). I am indebted to former director Simon Goldhill and current director of CRASSH Steven Connor for their encouragement and support during that time. I am also sincerely grateful to Alice Wilson, Sertaç Sehlikoglu, Serra Hakyemez, Mezna Qato, Marta Agosti, Sebastien Bachelet, Sami Everett, Sian Lazar, and Charles Tripp who generously commented on earlier versions of the paper. Two anonymous reviewers at HA provided truly constructive feedback. Fieldwork was funded by the Leverhulme Trust UK and the School of Social Science and Public Policy at King's College London.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Even though Perspectives – al-Amel al-Tunisi veterans as well as Nachaz-Dissonances members are now open about their involvement in left militantism, in this article I only name those figures who have shared details of their action through published memoirs, interviews, and documentaries.

2 At the time of my research, one of Nachaz’s projects was the fostering of programmes of ‘popular education’. In line with experiences of such programmes elsewhere, this would consist in a country-wide movement to democratize knowledge and make it available to all citizens regardless of age, gender, status and location. Taking knowledge and expertise out of existing institutions and into the communities, it would extricate ‘education’ from the instrumentalism of the job market.

3 This network of geographical alliances widens further if we take into consideration that the protesters of May 68 in France had forged their organizational skills in preceding actions against the continuation of French colonialism in Algeria (Ross 2008).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Leverhulme Trust UK [RF-2014-721].