Event Announcement! Decolonizing Tunisia’s Decolonization: The Armed Liberation Struggle and Post-Colonial Planning, A Discussion with Max Ajl (7 November, George Mason University)

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Oct 30, 2018 Tunisia
Event Announcement! Decolonizing Tunisia’s Decolonization: The Armed Liberation Struggle and Post-Colonial Planning, A Discussion with Max Ajl (7 November, George Mason University)

Event Announcement! Decolonizing Tunisia’s Decolonization: The Armed Liberation Struggle and Post-Colonial Planning, A Discussion with Max Ajl (7 November, George Mason University)

By : Jadaliyya Reports

WEDNESDAY, 7 NOV 12:00PM 
JOHNSON CENTER, ROOM G (2ND FLOOR) 
GEORGE MASON UNIVERSITY  


OPEN TO THE PUBLIC | Pizza and drinks will be provided

During the mid-1950s, an almost unknown and erased-from-history armed anti-colonial revolt – the Fellaga/Youssefite rebellion – rippled across the Tunisian countryside, sweeping across the width and depth of the country, even penetrating urban cores. My dissertation, Farmers, Fellaga, and Frenchmen: National Liberation and Post-Colonial Development in Tunisia, recovers the historical memory of that revolt, writing the armed struggle and its repression into the history of the Tunisian national liberation struggle and its effects on subsequent state-building efforts. In so doing I locate the place of the rural smallholder and newly landless, who although central to national liberation would be marginal to post-colonial development. This story cuts against the grain of dominant post-colonial historiography, which depicts a unitary and largely non-violent Western-oriented national struggle as the agent of independence. Such a narrative is the cement which the party has used to justify both its rule, post-colonial developmentalism, and subsequent social inclusions and exclusions. My dissertation shows how moments of collective violence, fueled by regional pan-Arab solidarities and material, propelled the political party which led the liberation movement, the Neo-Destour, to victory and secured the country’s sovereignty from France. Simultaneously, the repression of that struggle led to the exclusion of the marginalized countryside from subsequent state-formation and economic development plans. 

Sponsored by: Middle East and Islamic Studies, Center for Global Islamic Studies, and Arab Studies Institute

* * * * * * *
 
 
Max Ajl is a doctoral student in development sociology at Cornell University, completing a dissertation on the Tunisian national liberation struggle and post-colonial underdevelopment. His research focuses on food, agrarian, and ecological issues in the broader Arab region, as well as the intellectual history of development alternatives. Max’s articles on intellectual history have been published in the Review of African Political Economy and the Journal of Peasant Studies, and his articles on Syrian and Yemeni long-term rural underdevelopment are forthcoming in several edited collections. He is a member of the Political Economy Project and a co-editor of the Palestine and Political Economy pages at Jadaliyya, and is a member of Thimar, a collective focusing on agriculture in the Arab region. He is also an associated researcher with the Observatory for Food Sovereignty and the Environment, in Tunisia. 
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Call for Papers: Desert Futures - Sahara and Sonoran

Both the Sahara Desert and the Sonoran Desert have long been treated as liminal sites and testing grounds for the exercise of discursive and geopolitical power. Both have also long been cast as empty, or defined as borders where the reach of civilization fades into anti-human frontier. These deserts have been made testing grounds for nuclear weapons, zones of indefinite detention and death, and spaces of ecological disaster and geopolitical threat. Narcotraficantes rampage through the Sonoran Desert; Islamic militias lurk in the depths of the Sahara Desert; “illegal” immigrants, goods, and animals are smuggled across both deserts; and Western civilization consolidates itself against the threats posed by these anti-human specters. Such visions carry justifications for policing, gridding, exploiting, and even refertilizing projects in both places.

We propose that comparative focus on these two deserts, in particular, will both challenge these reductive yet profoundly consequential perceptions and will alter some of the institutional frameworks that organize literary studies. By bringing attention to deserts that have long been cast as marginal non-spaces despite spanning the borders of multiple nation-states, we will consider what such a paradigm shift may offer in terms of reimagining planetary relations and connections. This juxtaposition will also permit us to raise methodological and epistemological questions about how to organize literary studies in ways that move beyond existing comparative frameworks, such as linguistic (Amazigh, Anglophone, Arabophone, Francophone, Hispanophone), theoretical (World Literature, Comparative Literature, Postcolonial Literature), and spatial (nations, borders, regions) categories.

Our seminar seeks to complement and extend efforts to think along other axes and practices for comparative literary study. We aim to illuminate pathways for south-south, multilingual, and transnational intellectual exchanges that have been overlooked. We hope that this approach to desert studies will bring to light previously ignored connections. In particular, our comparative approach draws from and supplements Oceanic Studies, especially as proposed in PMLA 125.3 (2010). Oceanic Studies created an alternative means to trace global networks and flows, and it has offered novel, connective terms for comparative literary studies. Moreover, recent work on connectivity in the Mediterranean and the Saharan Desert guide our effort to rethink inherited disciplinary boundaries. In examining a series of key terms, protocols and questions developed under the rubric of “Comparative Desert Studies,” we aim to generate a similarly invigorating model for reconceptualizing comparative methodologies by seeking avenues to rethink dominant frameworks that presently organize literary and cultural studies.

Interested scholars can upload their abstracts by clicking on this link between August 20 and September 20. 

Contact the organizers here:

Jill Jarvis: jill.jarvis@yale.edu

Francisco Robles: frobles1@nd.edu

Brahim El Guabli: be2@williams.edu