Group OCTOPUS extension

Introduction

When synthesizing the event, we found ourselves grappling with new terminology. Many of the terms embraced by academics to talk about revolution appear distant from the phenomena they seek to describe. This is inevitably because they are enmeshed in decades of debates and different schools of thought. Still, the concepts which become part and parcel of intellectual discourse are in many ways rooted in social movements, so the question becomes: why do these concepts often look so different when they travel from the square to the ivory tower?

We struggled with the conceptualization of the body and the social. What follows is an attempt to grapple with the concepts which the speakers have provided to help us think through the past decade of uprising and revolutions. This exercise was fruitful for us in understanding the event itself, but it also left us wondering, can the gap between academic discussions about uprising and the uprisings themselves be breached? What is at stake when we conceptualize uprisings and revolutions?

In what follows, we too engage in academic writing style that might be inaccessible to many. We realize that there is a tension here that is a common problem in the role of the intellectuals and their areas of interest. In this event, we were challenged as a group to engage with the terminology that was presented by the speakers, and on a personal level we were challenged to respond to these big questions in simpler accessible language when talking to our family members and friends.

Body

In response to Nasser Abourahme’s question about necessary concepts, Banu Bargu gave us the concept of ‘the body’ to help us make sense of the last decade of uprising. She is thinking with examples of bodily harm as resistance to oppression. We provide here three examples of protesters who use their bodies as a means of insurrection: Mohamed Bouazizi, Maher al-Akhras, and Loujain al-Hathloul.

On December 17, 2010, Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire in front of the provincial government building in the town of Sidi Bouzid, Tunisia in an act of self-immolation and political protest. As a street vendor, Bouazizi had been targeted by the local police repeatedly for several years. Bouazizi was once again harassed by the police on the morning of December 17 for lacking a vendor’s permit and refusing to pay a bribe. A municipal official followed up by confiscating Bouazizi’s electronic scale and knocking over his cart. Bouazizi went to the government building to make a complaint, but was denied entrance. Two and a half weeks after his self-immolation, Bouazizi succumbed to his injuries and passed away on January 4, 2011. Bouazizi’s political protest, against both the economic inequalities in Tunisia and the repressive security apparatus that enforced these conditions, led to an uprising across Tunisia and others in the rest of North Africa and the Middle East that resulted in political change in Tunisia, Egypt, and Yemen, the last of which has resulted in a protracted civil conflict as with Libya and Syria.

On July 27, 2020, Maher al-Akhras was arrested by the Israeli Shin Bet forces and was put in administrative detention. ‘Administrative detention’ is the Israeli method for incarcerating Palestinians without pressing charges or holding trial, which makes it impossible for detainees to defend themselves against administrative detention order. In protest, on the day of his arrest al-Akhras began a hunger strike. After more than a hundred days, during which al-Akhras was in critical condition, the Israeli authorities had agreed to not extend his administrative detention beyond November 26 (the original date for the expiration of the detention order), if al-Akhras ended his hunger strike. Al-Akhras agreed to the condition and is expected to be released on November 26.

Loujain al-Hathloul is a women’s rights activist in Saudi Arabia. Al-Hathloul has been in and out of jail on several occasions due to her active political expression and calls for structural change by defying many of the oppressive patriarchal laws, such as the right to drive and the male guardianship system. Al-Hathloul has now been detained by Saudi Arabia since May 2018. Several human rights organizations have reported that al-Hathloul has been tortured extensively throughout her imprisonment, and her trial has been indefinitely postponed. In August 2020, al-Hathloul successfully went on a six day hunger strike in order to get permission to speak to her family, an opportunity previously denied to her but permitted to others. On October 26, 2020 al-Hathloul began a new hunger strike to demand regular phone calls with her family. Under international pressure stemming from this most recent hunger strike, the Saudi authorities at the time of this lecture were reportedly considering al-Hathloul’s release ahead of the upcoming November 2020 G20 summit.

Returning to Bargu’s intervention, we asked ourselves, what does ‘the body’ mean? What can a focus on ‘the body’ do? What does a focus on ‘the body’ render visible? Poignantly, Bargu argues that acts of self-harm as resistance, such as Bouazizi’s self immolation, and al-Akhras’ and al-Hathloul’s hunger strikes, turn the body into both an object and subject of violence. An object, because structural violence operates on the body. A subject, because a political act of self-harm reflects the violence of the regime back at it. It is a “somatization of structural violence,” Bargu further argues, which presents a critique of a disembodied conception of politics. Indeed, a focus on ‘the body’ renders visible the corporeal dimension of resistance. As Bargu notes, these acts are “writing the body back into the social.” In paying close attention to the weaponization of the body as a form of protest, we are able to notice the nuances of this form of resistance. With that in mind, we turn to ask: what does a focus on ‘the body’ as a concept render invisible?

‘The body’ as a concept could help us understand the uprising and provide a technical tool to explore the ‘how’, but the ‘why’ could slip away when X will use their body in a relation to the political and socio-economic rationale behind the act. The death of Alan al-Kurdi, for example, sparked heartwarming acts throughout Europe to welcome refugees in the short term, but in the long term it failed; individualizing al-Kurdi’s body failed to address the reasoning of why the family was forced to seek refuge in the first place. The problem of this approach deals with consequences rather than the causes. As these acts happen on the margins, they do not reach the surface unless they end with death. We fear the focus on the body as a weapon against the state, as much as it is important to understand, may shift the focus away from the circumstances that create a deprived situation that leads X to harm themselves. The poetics and romanticized ideas, probably, are the last thoughts behind X intention. Indeed, while the hunger strike is the weapon, the act’s context should remain in our focus when attempting to understand the greater reason behind it.

Social

Can ‘the social’ as a concept help us better understand uprisings and revolutions in the 21st century?

In his talk, Hage described the L-shaped spatial distribution of the uprising in Beirut. “In the top of the L, were people who were facing the parliament and were looking for confrontation and wanted to engage the police… A bit further down the L, there were people who were engaging in creative sloganeering and graffiti… On the corner of the L you had academics doing sit-ins and engaging in teach-ins. And on the bottom of the L, facing the mosque, there was a huge section of the population, which was political because it came down [to the protest], but there was more carnival feeling with families with kids, ice-cream, popcorn and what have you” (24:00). Hage describes the L shaped clusters of protesters in order to ask, what do these protesters have in common, besides a general dissatisfaction with the political situation in Lebanon? For Hage, it is a “desire for the social” that brought the protesters down to the streets. When we were thinking about how to synthesize this event, we were wondering what does ‘the social’ even mean? What is its antithesis? Why is there a ‘desire’ for ‘the social’? And, can ‘the social’ as a concept help us better understand uprisings and revolutions in the 21st century?

This past decade of uprising, the protracted present, is defined by the neoliberal era which began its ascendancy in the 1970s and fully asserted dominance in the early 1980s. The neoliberal era of global capitalism, which continues through the present, was a direct response to the democratizing trends of the 1960s and has dramatically escalated economic inequality and placed political power solidly back in the hands of the global elite. Neoliberalism, or neoliberal capitalism, considered narrowly characterizes economic policy centered around the primacy of the free market such as the dismantling and privatization of state-functions or the welfare state, and the deregulation of markets. More broadly, neoliberalism can also be considered as a cultural, sociopolitical ideology that emphasizes individuality, diminishing the power of labor unions and collective action.

Largely influenced by the withdrawal of the state from social institutions and burgeoning rates of both deindustrialization and financialization, we have seen traditional modes of struggle change. In Joshua Clover’s Riot. Strike. Riot: The New Era of Uprisings , he asks provocatively: In the absence of robust organized labor in much of the world and the inability to directly affect global market-based prices with local looting and riots, what type of revolt is possible? Or, put by Toscano, how does one “extract, develop, reinvent a theory of revolution in the absence of its traditional Marxist referents?” Neoliberalism has had a marked effect on the acceptable boundaries of political economic thought. The dominance of the market has a tendency to act as an ideological prison, preventing most professional or public intellectuals from venturing outside what is considered normal and natural. Neoliberalism’s market fundamentalism actively cultivates compliance and manufactures consent.

The strict limits held by neoliberal thought have been on display during the contemporary moment of protest and revolt in the early 21st century. While the causes of uprising around the world ought be attributed to neoliberal policy, resulting in severe inequality, segregation, and deprivation, the popular dissent that has characterized the years since the 2008 global recession has been deradicalized, largely ignoring any proposals for reconfigured property relations or a fundamental redistribution of wealth and resources. This is not to say that no one or no organization who has participated in the protracted present of uprising has manage to think outside the limits of neoliberalism; the 2011 Egyptian uprising was split, “between systemic and antisystemic opposition groups,” but the victors in the intra-movement power struggles at large have been non-revolutionary elites who co-opt the movements conform to neoliberal strictures. A distinguishing trait of neoliberal capitalism as it spreads through the coercive forces of globalizing financial institutions is the proliferation of non-governmental organizations and the professionalization of political activism.

In the neoliberal era, professional advocacy groups and political elites nearly unanimously speak in the language of the post-World War II western framework of human rights. NGOs engage in work related to women’s rights, youth activism, development, and self-help, backed by international and corporate donors. This neoliberal human rights discourse certainly devotes attention to important issues, but inherently ignores any discussion of economic rights as human rights. Poverty reduction comes in the form of charity or microloans, while refusing to support economic rights such as the right to publicly-funded healthcare, the right for labor to collectively organize, or democratic control over corporate wealth and private industry. The discontent that fueled the 2011 Arab uprisings and the various movements around the world in this past decade can be attributed to neoliberal capitalism, but these uprisings have ultimately failed to articulate that reasoning in a united platform; a, “painful paradox… [of] revolutionary mobilization with a reformist trajectory.” Nearly ten years on from these rebellions, the outcomes in the regional Middle East and North Africa range from new articulations of old political structures to protracted, violent, civil conflict.

And yet, how has neoliberalism affected the way we relate to one another? It is perhaps the ubiquitous pervasiveness of neoliberalism into the most intimate forms of human relationality that has brought about a form of uprising that is not a social movement, but a social space. Almost as if it is in the state of exception, that is the uprising, that ‘the social’ can be realized. If we are inclined to borrow Agamben’s notion of the “state of exception,” and the eventual evolution of the ‘exception’ into the ‘rule,’ then perhaps, if we follow Hage in seeing the uprising as a social space that is realized only when there is an exceptional time of protest, this social space can be normalized and become the rule? In other words, perhaps it is the very unstructuredness and heterogeneity of the revolutions of the 2000s that allow them to speak back to neoliberalism and its pervasive individuating effects.

a form of uprising that is not a social movement, but a social space

If the “desire for the social” is in part a response to the atomizing effects of neoliberalism, how do recent uprisings attempt to undo these neoliberal subjectivities through use of public space? How do uprisings re-imagine social relations and subjectivities? Congregating is itself an act of coming together and a visible rejection of individuation. But the public spaces—parks, streets, sidewalks, buildings, walls, squares, traffic circles—used by the people in protest movements in Cairo, Beirut, Bahrain, Tunis, and so on, have arguably served as more than just the settings of uprisings.

Lefebvre and other scholars in recent decades have criticized the privatization of urban spaces. The “capital-based interests” of authorities, they denounce, result in the “loss of [the people’s] ownership” of public space. This lack of public space creates social fissures and severely limits participation in social and civic activities. In Cairo for instance, the state even before Mubarak neglected to invest in the neighborhoods and public spaces within the city, while the wealthy upper class relocated to private, gated communities. A lack of investment in sufficient housing, in the maintenance of streets and buildings, and a lack of public services such as waste management and clean water, compounded by surveillance and state-of-emergency laws, have prohibited access to and use of public spaces.

Beirut, as Ghassan Hage alludes to, has lost public spaces not to lack of investment, but to privatization. After the civil war, real estate developers and the joint-stock company Solidere bought up the city center and many of the city’s historic buildings that had been severely damaged during the war. These developers’ projects centered on the construction of new highways, modern architecture, private beach resorts, and high-end shopping streets. This commercialization of the city’s space and places of leisure in post-war Beirut’s downtown and coastal areas catered to Lebanese and international elites, rather than to the public.

The language of protesters in these and other cities evoke the sense “loss” that Harb articulates, as they aim to “reclaim” these spaces from the state, financiers, or private developers. In Taksim Square in Istanbul, Başak Ertür considers this rhetoric “something akin to a fantasy of ‘taking back Taksim’… as a driving force.” This notion of “taking back” the space “operates as if the square had once properly belonged to the people.” Ertür argues though that “it is that very as if that testifies to the entanglement of monumental spaces with political imaginaries that yields particular forms of spatial practices.” What then are the “spatial practices” that take place during uprisings? If the spaces themselves are tied to political and financial articulations of power, can the “taking back” of these spaces be read as an attempt to re-articulate and restructure the rules and norms of a state or society?

Whether gathering in Taksim Square, in Tahrir Square, in the streets of Beirut, or writing and painting on the walls of these and many other cities, the protesters made themselves visible, saying and showing that “we are here.” As these gatherings persisted over the course of days and weeks, these protesters also began to practice new ways of living, interacting and being. People of different sects, economic backgrounds, organizations and ideologies, who normally would not have crossed paths, encountered each other and interacted daily in these spaces in new ways. Cooking, offering medical care, creating art and music, engaging in discussions, cleaning, prayer and other daily rituals took place communally. “This new art of living together, of experimenting with different forms of politics, sociality and being, exemplifies what Greene termed ‘accents of protest’ in relation to viewing places themselves as ‘rhetorical tactics in movement towards social change.’”

This communal living perhaps created “social spaces” where people were able to enact alternative social relations and imagine new political horizons during the days of uprising. The realization of new “social spaces” often did not materially endure, though. These sites, whether in Bahrain, Cairo, Tunis, Athens, or Washington, DC, become targets of the state: by barricading, transforming or destroying the physical sites themselves, the state counters these movements and attempts to reassert its power.

Regardless of the fate of the sites themselves, what happens when the protesters leave these spaces? Is this “art of living together” confined to the square and to the particular moment of uprising? Whether or not these new “social spaces” endure, can the realization of these new imaginaries persist even after the protesters are forced to return to their daily lives, which are still often structured by the same neoliberal frameworks they sought to dismantle?

Inheritance

• common languages
• demands
• aesthetics
• historical perspectives
• global spaces...

One of the principal tasks faced by scholars analyzing the global uprisings of the present is to develop a way of discussing the commonalities between them without flattening their particularistic demands or positions. While the local contexts of many of the uprisings discussed in the event vary drastically, there seemed in many cases to be common languages, demands, aesthetics, historical perspectives (or rejections of historical determinism), and in some cases even a shared notion of the “global” spaces they inhabit. Such broad questions are difficult to approach without falling prey to a reductive essentialism. And yet, to focus on the different uprisings merely from a comparative standpoint misses the mark by failing to recognize the ways that uprisings and those who participate in them are always already in conversation with other uprisings, present or past.

always already in conversation with other uprisings, present or past.

Of the approaches to these questions, one which was picked up and expanded upon by the panelists and discussant was the idea of inheritance. First mentioned in the talk by Ghassan Hage, inheritance may serve as one entry point into discussions about commonality, geographic scale, and historicity in the time of revolt. But even as it keys us into continuities and commonalities in some places, in others it highlights ruptures and disjunctures. Hage, throughout his work, has a tendency to take tried and tested anthropological concepts and reinvigorate them with a new sort of propulsive power by throwing them into vastly different contexts. His invoking of “inheritance” in the event is one example of this. Inheritance is often assumed to be synonymous with lineage or genealogy, and in this sense can sometimes resemble deterministic teleologies. Writing on the historical straitjacketing of the 2011 uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa, Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi details how media commentators for years had tried to craft a discourse around the “Spring” of the Arab world, evocative of the “‘Spring Time of Nations’ in Europe of 1848, Prague Spring of 1968, or Eastern Europe of 1989.” “By naming it the ‘Arab Spring,’” Ghamari-Tabrizi argues, “the uprisings entered a conceptual and discursive universe with a written past and a known future direction.” Such narratives not only pigeonhole these movements, but can also force particular assumptions about who the subjects of these revolutionary movements are to begin with. Despite the social composition of protesters in Lebanon crosscutting class, nationality, or faith, many analyses expunged particular groups from these broad-based coalitions. In a recent Tweet, Mezna Qato noted, “So jarring, but maybe unsurprising, how much unanimity there is in Lebanese popular uprisings as beginning on 17 Oct 2019. As if the uprisings in the [Palestinian] camps that summer, in July, were in another country, another world. As @Hana_Sleiman points out, the non-citizen erased, again.”

However, as Hage noted, inheritance is never quite as stable or all-encompassing as it is often assumed to be. Rather, it is something that can be accepted, rejected, or “negotiated.” What would it mean, then, for uprisings to link themselves to historical conjunctures, geographic locales, or aesthetics and signs other than those accorded to them by commentators–or by History itself? To continue with Ghamari-Tabrizi for a moment, this seems to be exactly what drew Foucault’s interest to the men and women agitating for change during the 1979 Iranian Revolution:

Foucault highlighted in Iran the struggle of a nation asserting itself for both an inclusion (in making history) and an exit (from terminal history). He conceived the indeterminacy of the revolutionary movement in Iran as a possible source of creativity and inspiration rather than an expression of backwardness finally unleashed forward toward progress.

In short, it is the idea of indeterminately negotiating a historical inheritance which Foucault found most striking. The challenges that these types of movements posed to the contemporary exigency of classification, of establishing historicity, can be seen too in Alberto Toscano’s comments on the idea of the riot. In refusing to articulate a particular set of demands, riots instead serve as impromptu phenomena responding with immediacy to a need for action. Defying the expression of a common platform or an inauguration into History, they can be seen as inherently “anti-strategic” but can be said to pose challenges to teleologies as well, by temporarily suspending history. But do riots not have a history of their own? Are they not in conversation with other spontaneous agitation both past and present?

The spontaneity of “riots” and their associated exceptionalism as episodes rather than sustained, organized movements complicate how they’re inscribed into history and how their inheritance might be negotiated. As Toscano suggests, “riots” have contested, racialized legacies, as evidenced in American history. Riots and rebellions of colonial settlers against the British monarchy are interpreted within a history of American might, bravery and patriotism. The violent riots in response to the Stamp Act in the American colonies in 1765, for instance, are remembered as actions that lead to American liberty from the British. Black Americans striving for liberties, though–whether during the American Revolution, the 1967 Detroit riots, or the Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests since 2014–are smeared as “looters” or “thugs.” In an article about the BLM protests from summer 2020 in The Atlantic, historian Kellie Carter Jackson contends that “Freedom through violence is a privilege possessed only by whites. Seminal moments in U.S. history that historians have defined as patriotic were also moments that denied patriotism to black people.” Writing about George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery, and the BLM protests within the framework of rebellions during the American Revolution for American freedom challenges how legacies of riots and revolution are framed, and how these frameworks can be negotiated depending on one’s positionality.

Regardless of a movement’s spontaneity, duration or ideological platform, riots, uprisings, movements, etc. all have multiple historical “reference points” as Lisa Duggan asserts. Depending on the historical lens we choose as the filter of our scrutiny, an uprising’s temporality and legacy can shape-shift. Even though the BLM movement is an organization with a coordinated, nation-wide network, the protests that spread across the US this past summer following the death of George Floyd hold different temporal and historical implications and draw on different sources of inspiration depending on one’s positionality. The Salvage Editorial Collective points to these concurrent temporalities: on one hand, the summer 2020 wave of protests might be viewed as a culmination of years of other local and national BLM uprisings since the August 9, 2014 killing of Michael Brown and demonstrations in Ferguson, MO. George Floyd’s death and the subsequent protests might be read in this case as a tipping point or a turning point toward broader support for concrete policy changes, as banning chokeholds or support to defund police departments have gained traction. On the other hand, the summer 2020 protests across the country marked the “sudden explosion of ‘allyship’” of white Americans. “But what of motive?” the Salvage Editorial Collective asks. Were those participating for the first time in BLM protests in 2020 drawing upon the same reference points, the same inspiration as those who had been organizing and demonstrating for the end of police brutality and racial inequality for years already? Did they, as the article also asks, demonstrate now simply because of the free time allotted to them or new arising concerns due to the pandemic shutdowns? How will these temporalities and reference points get periodized into a longer historical narrative? What are the risks of these varying perspectives or inconsistent temporalities? How do the histories and legacies of uprisings get negotiated and deployed strategically, to serve a particular aim, or even preclude the same event being inherited by multiple actors?

Accepting or refusing inheritance is not always a unidirectional pursuit. States or other counterrevolutionary agents fending off powerful social movements will often seek to intimate certain historical and ideological genealogies in order to discredit or delegitimize their opponents. Those on the American right who wish to raise the specter of “left-wing antisemitism” are quick to note Black Lives Matter’s allegiances to the Palestinian struggle as the expression of a conflated anti-zionism-cum-antisemitism. Elsewhere, Toscano and Nina Power have also highlighted former French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s amalgamating the protests of the European left in 1968 with the 2005 rioting of young banlieusards decrying police brutality. In one turn of phrase, he simultaneously excises both uprisings from state sanctioned readings of French history: “‘In this election,’ Nicolas Sarkozy proclaimed in 2007, ‘we’re going to find out if the heritage of May ’68 is going to be perpetuated or if it will be liquidated once and forever.’”

Indeed, the strategic deployment of inheritance is often within the purview of counterrevolutionary forces, chief among them the state. As forces positioned against the revolution, the state and its ruling class use inheritance in two ways: through family descendants and through the military’s institutional memory. The former can be observed in Syria, Bashar al-Assad inherited power from his father, Hafez al-Assad; in Lebanon, Jumblatt (Progressive Socialist Party), Franjieh (Marada Movement), and Hariri (Future Movement) each inherited party power from their fathers; in Iraq, al-Sadr inherited a popular movement from his grandfather. Here, inherited family legacy functions as a tool for legitimizing the state, when its institutions by design are unable to provide the legitimacy to rule. The latter can be seen in Egypt, Sudan, and Algeria, where the military has a monopoly of violence independent of the countries’ civil leadership. The military thrives on its historical inheritance and fights vigorously again any change that could threaten its position in power. Building on both power and legacy, the army here acts as if it is above the government, producing itself as a ruling class.

It is worth asking, too, what the drawbacks of a concept like inheritance might be in a discussion of commonality and rupture. Is it possible that such a concept places too much of an emphasis on the temporal lag between movements to the extent that it glosses over shared language and aesthetics which appear contemporaneously? What does such a deference to historical thought do to our thinking about the present? In temporal terms, these uprisings keep bubbling to the surface in different states of motion and of time, in that sense, these uprisings–although they commonly reject the inherited status quo–speak to common present circumstances and not just common histories. This applies to the seizure of space from Chile, to Peru, to Belarus, to Nigeria, to Lebanon, to Sudan, and the United States which each have their own local issues but, facing the effects of a global neoliberal order, have some resonance between them too; inheritance could help us comprehend the reasons and causes behind uprisings.

Conclusion

The title of this event was, “The Protracted Present of Uprising.” This requires some decryption. With this present of global uprising, there is a parallel global authoritarian, reactionary backlash. Dynamic authoritarian regimes are able to maintain their positions by containing the power of the uprisings. It is essential to diagnose symptoms of global counterrevolution.

With this present of global uprising, there is a parallel global authoritarian, reactionary backlash

As we approach the 10th anniversary of the 2011 Arab uprisings, we should revisit what has happened since Bouazizi burned himself alive in protest of economic inequality and state repression; his body was not the patient zero that the many observers and analysts consider him to be. He was the hair that broke the back of the camel, the structural and root causes of popular discontent were growing long before Bouazizi’s defiant protest. Ten years later, political, economic, and social circumstances across the Middle East and North Africa hold the people in a precarious position; the continuation of protests signals that the demands of the people have not yet been met. The state, initially trembling before the might of the people, has now digitally and aesthetically rebranded itself while becoming more robust and brutal than ever. Nonetheless, the motivation to protest continues to filter across the region.

Beyond the question of state resilience and the perseverance of demonstrators, we would like to think about what happens when the protester goes home. What happens when we return from the demonstration and go back to our daily lives? What remains of the uprising after we are subsumed back into our jobs, our school work, our mundane lives within this neoliberal capitalist global order?

Additional Resources

Abaza, Mona. “ An Emerging Memorial Space? In Praise of Mohammed Mahmud Street .” Jadaliyya . 2012.

Azhari, Timour. “ As protests grow, Lebanese are ‘reclaiming’ public spaces .” Al Jazeera . 2019.

Azoulay, Ariella. “Revolution,” in Political Concepts: A Critical Lexicon . 2012.

Azoulay, Ariella. “ Revolution Is A Language: A lecture ” (2012). YouTube. 2013.

Badiou, Alain. “ Tunisie, Egypte : quand un vent d’est balaie l’arrogance de l’Occident .” Le Monde . 2011.

Bargu, Banu. “ Bodies against War: Voluntary Human Shielding as a Practice of Resistance .” AJIL Unbound. 2016.

Bargu, Banu. Starve and Immolate: The Politics of Human Weapons . 2014.

Bargu, Banu, ed. Turkey’s Necropolitical Laboratory: Democracy, Violence, and Resistance . 2019.

Bayat, Asef. Revolution without Revolutionaries: Making Sense of the Arab Spring . 2017.

Bertho, Alain and Joseph Confavreux. “‘ It’s not just a social movement’: An Interview with Alain Bertho. ” Verso Blog . 2018.

Butler, Judith, Gambetti, Zeynep, and Sabsay, Leticia (eds.). Vulnerability in Resistance . 2016.

Clover, Joshua. Riot. Strike. Riot: The New Era of Uprising . 2019.

Davidson, Mark. “ Editorial: Private is profit and the public is dead? ” City. 2018.

Elyachar, Julia. “ Writing the Revolution: Dilemmas of Ethnographic Writing after the January 25th Revolution in Egypt .” Jadaliyya .

Faleh, Majdi, “ How city squares can be public places of protest or centres of state control .” The Conversation . 2018.

Firat, Begum Özden. “ Patterns of Revolt: On Global Uprisings and Revolutionary Imagery. ” Quaderns de la Mediterrània. 2018.

Ghamari-Tabrizi, Behrooz. Foucault in Iran: Islamic Revolution after the Enlightenment . 2016.

Gordon, Joel and Heba Arafa. “’ Stuck with Him’: Bassem Youssef and the Egyptian Revolution’s Last Laugh. ” Review of Middle East Studies . 2014.

Gordon, Neve and Nicola Perugini. Human Shields: A History of People in the Line of Fire . 2020.

Hage, Ghassan. Alter-Politics: Critical Anthropology and the Radical Imagination . 2015.

Halliday, Fred. Revolution and World Politics: The Rise and Fall of the Sixth Great Power . 1999.

Harb, Mona, “ Why Space Matters in the Arab Uprisings (and Beyond) .” Jadaliyya. 2017.

Harvey, David. A Brief History of Neoliberalism . 2005.

Hracs, Brian J. and Massam, Bryan H. “ Places/Spaces of Celebration and Protest: Citizenship, Civic Conversations and the Promotion of Rights and Obligations .” Canadian Journal of Urban Research . 2008.

Lindblom, Charles. “ The Market as Prison .” Journal of Politics. 1982.

Lisiak, Agata. “ The Ballerina and the Blue Bra: Femininity in Recent Revolutionary Iconography .” View. Theories and Practices of Visual Culture. 2014.

Mouffe, Chantal. “ Artistic Activism and Agonistic Spaces .” Art&Research: A Journal of Ideas, Contexts and Methods. 2007.

Nazzal, Maryam and Chinder, Samer. “ Lebanon Cities’ Public Spaces .” The Journal of Public Space. April 2018.

Naeem, Hani. “ Graffiti and the Arab uprising - Culture & Dialogue .” Trans. Robin Moger. Heinrich Böll Stiftung . 2013.

Perry, Tom. “ Towering gates at Cairo’s Tahrir Square draw criticism .” Reuters . 2014.

Power, Nina and Alberto Toscano. “ The Philosophy of Restoration: Alain Badiou and the Enemies of May .” boundary 2. 2009.

Stacher, Joshua. Watermelon Democracy: Egypt’s Turbulent Transition . 2020.

Werbner, Pnina, Webb, Martin, and Spellman-Poots, Kathryn (eds.). The Political Aesthetics of Global Protest: The Arab Spring and Beyond . 2014.

Winegar, Jessica. “ Taking Out the Trash .” Middle East Report . Summer 2011.

Articles Accompanying the Lecture

Denning, Michael. “ Wageless Life .” New Left Review . 2010.

Tiqqun. “ Let’s Disappear .” Extract from To Our Friends . 2015.

Salvage Editorial Collective. “ Burn it all Down .” 2020.

Notes

1. “ Mohamed Bouazizi .” Wikipedia.

2. Lageman, Thessa. “ Mohamed Bouazizi: Was the Arab Spring worth dying for? ” Aljazeera . 2016.

3. “ Loujain al-Hathloul .” Wikipedia.

4. “ Prominent Saudi women's rights activist on hunger strike in detention, says family. ” Reuters. 10/27/2020.

5. Joshua Clover, Riot. Strike. Riot: The New Era of Uprising (New York: Verso, 2019).

6. Ibid.

7. See the YouTube video of this event at the top of the page.

8. Charles, Lindblom “The Market as Prison,” Journal of Politics Vol. 44(2) (1982): 334.

9. Asef Bayat, Revolution without Revolutionaries: Making Sense of the Arab Spring (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2017), 23.

10. Joshua Stacher, Watermelon Democracy: Egypt’s Turbulent Transition (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2020), 124.

11. Bayat, 25.

12. Bayat, 154.

13. Agamben

14. Mark Davidson, “Editorial: Private is profit and the public is dead?” City , vol. 22:3, 2018:313-320.

15. Mona Harb, “ Why Space Matters in the Arab Uprisings (and Beyond) ,” Jadaliyya. Feb 16, 2017.

16. Ibid.

17. Jessica Winegar, " Taking Out the Trash ," Middle East Report , 259 (Summer 2011).

18. Başak Ertür, “Barricades: Resources and Residues of Resistance,” in Vulnerability in Resistance , edited by Judith Butler, Zeynep Gambetti, and Leticia Sabsay, 105-106. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016.

19. Hanan Sabea, “‘I Dreamed of Being a People’: Egypt’s Revolution, the People and Critical Imagination,” In The Political Aesthetics of Global Protest: The Arab Spring and Beyond . Edited by Pnina Werbner, Martin Webb and Kathryn Spellman-Poots. Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh University Press (2014). 79.

20. Ertür, “Barricades: Resources and Residues of Resistance,” 109; Sabea, “‘I Dreamed of Being a People’: Egypt’s Revolution, the People and Critical Imagination,” 83-84.

21. Hanan Sabea, “‘I Dreamed of Being a People’: Egypt’s Revolution, the People and Critical Imagination,” In The Political Aesthetics of Global Protest: The Arab Spring and Beyond . Edited by Pnina Werbner, Martin Webb and Kathryn Spellman-Poots. Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh University Press (2014). 78.

22. See also: Ghassan Hage, “Academia in the Revolution,” Lecture, Beirut, 2019; Ghassan Hage “The Arab Social Sciences and the Two Critical Traditions,” in Alterpolitics: Critical Anthropology and the Radical Imagination (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2015).

23. Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi, Foucault in Iran: Islamic Revolution after the Enlightenment (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016), 2.

24. Ibid.

25. Mezna Qato, Twitter post, November 3, 2020, 4:03 PM.

26. Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi, Foucault in Iran: Islamic Revolution after the Enlightenment (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016), 3.

27. See also: Joshua Clover, Riot. Strike. Riot: The New Era of Uprising (New York: Verso, 2019).

28. “ Liberty! Chronicle of the Revolution: The Stamp Act Riots & Tar and Feathering ,” PBS online, 2004.

29. Kellie Carter Jackson, “ The Double Standard of the American Riot ” The Atlantic . June 1, 2020.

30. Ibid.

31. Salvage Editorial Collective, " Burn it all Down ," June 19, 2020.

32. Ibid.

33. Nina Power and Alberto Toscano, “The Philosophy of Restoration:Alain Badiou and the Enemies of May,” boundary 2 36:1 (2009): 27.

34. Alternatively, for Gadafi in Libya and Saleh in Yemen, uprisings blocked this family inheritance project.