School of Social and Political Science

Description

How long does a revolutionary moment last? In this talk, I trace what stays of a specific temporal parenthesis in Tunisia’s recent history, the ‘Jasmine Revolution’ of 2010-2011. Reflecting on conversations over the years with a group of young men from a working-class suburb of Tunis who took to the streets during the days of revolution, I attend to what are described as permanent bodily traces of the revolution – physical signs and ‘switches’ that happened during the revolution, but have outlived it. Attending to the permanence within personal biographies of a historical moment that has ended – for some, even failed – outside of them, I trace how bodily permanence forces us to reimagine what, and where, politics is.