Workshop 11: The Violence of Pluralism: Urban Transformations and New Political Subjectivities in the Rebellious Mediterranea
Abstract
The 2011 Arab uprisings and indignados protests in cities throughout the Mediterranean basin have witnessed the rise of a new historical generation intimately tied to evolving social and urban landscapes. More than a year later, certain cities remain a crucial site for staging the ongoing struggles against the remnants of the old order in Arab countries or massive protests in European countries. Although often depicted as relatively peaceful, these popular revolts have generated forms of violence, which challenge our understanding of how urban pluralism within various boundaries and scales (ethnic, religious, spatial, etc.) has been managed in a comparative perspective. This workshop seeks to break away from simplistic Orientalist strands of scholarship, which emphasize antiquity, confinement or religiosity around Muslim or holy cities, as well as from colonial depictions of urban duality -- a literature that too often overlooks inter-communal dynamics at the micro-level and underestimates social networking across ethnic divides. Instead, the workshop seeks papers that can shed light on the historical and contemporary urban transformations, which have favored the emergence of new political subjectivities and cross-sectarian alliances as well as violent communal conflicts.
Description
“In the Mediterranean, birthplace of the City-State, the State, whether it be inside or outside the city, always remains brutal and powerless, violent but weak, unifying but always undermined, under threat […] Every form of hegemony and homogeneity are refused in the Mediterranean. The very idea of centrality is refused because each group, each entity, each religion and each culture considers itself a center. The polyrhythmy of Mediterranean cities highlights their common character through their differences.” Henri Lefebvre Rhythmanalysis of Mediterranean Cities (1996:236).
“Street struggles and demonstrations have long been part of our history. What is different today is that they are happening simultaneously in so many parts of the world: the uprisings in the Arab world, Occupy Wall Street spreading to more and more U.S. cities, the daily neighborhood protests in China's major cities, Latin America's piqueteros […] The city is a space where the powerless can make history.” Saskia Sassen The Global Street (2011:574)
The 2011 uprisings and indignados protests in cities throughout the Mediterranean basin have witnessed the rise of a new historical generation intimately tied to evolving social and urban landscapes. In the context of the Arab region (western Asia and North Africa), it has been suggested that the emergence of spontaneous protests and social coalitions have heralded the emergence of new political subjectivities, often aggregated around a reinforced sense of national identification (Challand 2011). Generally described as peaceful protests, these uprisings and sit-ins have in reality often been accompanied by violent clashes. Cities and urban landscapes have been essential ingredients in the success or repression of these protests (Sassen 2011; Monterescu ms.). A year later, they are still an important place for the staging of the ongoing struggles against the remnants of the old order (e.g., protests in April 2012 in Tunis, Abbasiyya or Maspero clashes in Cairo), or for the ongoing massive protests in European and Mediterranean countries (Athens, Barcelona, Tel-Aviv). How have the multifaceted transformations of contemporary Mediterranean cities contributed to this wave of mobilization? What are the new challenges that Mediterranean cities are likely to face? Can we speak of similar trajectories for ‘the Mediterranean cities’?
Notwithstanding the emergence of a revolutionary collective imaginary, predicated on principles of freedom, accountability and distributive justice, these events threw into relief the foundational question of the coherence and unity of this fledging political subjectivity. In the face of ethnic diversity, class inequalities and urban fragmentation, the notion of the nation invoked in each of these countries calls for collective negotiation between rival factions often with dire consequences. In Cairo, slogans such as ‘Christians + Muslims = One Hand’ have mobilized a cohesive view of the sovereign people (al-sha`b) presented as a moral community (watan) composed of a solidary Muslim majority and a Christian minority (similar slogans were recorded in Syria: ‘Not Sunnis, not Alawis, we all want freedom,’ among others in its Kurdish areas: ‘Neither Arab, nor Kurdish, we want national unity’). Tragically, however, the aftermath of the regime change in Egypt soon gave way to ethnic violence directed against the very Christian brethren who demonstrated and prayed together in Maidan al-Tahrir. The collective rage (ghadab) heretofore directed exclusively against the corrupt authoritarian regime has violently targeted the Coptic minority, while in Syria, apocalyptic scenarios are often heard in terms of potential communal violence in cities that have been historically religiously and ethnically mixed.
From their inception in Tunisia in December 2010 political violence soon spread across the Middle East to other Arab countries including also non-Arab countries such as Israel and Iran. In some of these countries the mass mobilization brought about a regime change (Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and Yemen) or timid reforms (Jordan, Morocco, Palestine), while in others it was violently repressed (Syria, Bahrain), with part of the urban landscape significantly altered (Manama and the destruction of the Pearl Square monument, or in Tehran). The regional unrest has not been limited to countries of the Arab World or even to the Middle East per se. Across the Mediterranean Sea, European cities (notably in Spain and Greece) saw hundreds of thousands of protesters responding to the democratic agenda of the Arab revolts as well as to local grievances such as austerity measures, national financial crises, and the European sovereign debt crisis. Indeed, protests considered to be inspired by the Arab uprisings are taking place across the globe with varying degrees of success and prominence. While the cascading global impact of this regional wave of revolts is yet to be determined it is clear to most observers that it is an epoch-changing event that merits further attention and analysis.
Historical and Theoretical Framework
Studies of Middle Eastern and Mediterranean urbanism have traditionally been guided by a limited repertoire of tropes, which emphasize antiquity, confinement and religiosity (Rabinowitz and Monterescu 2008, passim). The notions of the old city, the qasbah, the medina, subsumed in the quintessential 'Islamic city', have all been part of Western scholarship’s longstanding fascination with the region (Weber 1958; Hourani 1970; Abu Lughod 1987; Monk 2002; Slyomovics 2001). Etched in emblematic ‘holy cities’ like Jerusalem, Mecca or Najaf, Middle Eastern urban space is heavily associated with the ‘sacred’ complete with mystical visions of violent redemption.
These depictions are analytically impounding. Accentuating authenticity and a concomitant cultural autochthony, their vividness often breeds essentialization and theoretical impasse. Fixated by obscuring idioms such as ‘stagnation’ and ‘traditionalism’ (Said 1979) Middle Eastern cities thus tend to have emergent urban configuration obfuscated and misrecognized. Responding to this Orientalist bias, scholars began framing Middle Eastern cities as instances of Third World urbanization (Abu-Lughod and Hay 1977). This comparative perspective focused on the colonial and postcolonial city as a site of class struggle, urban apartheid, imperial planning and colonial architecture.
This revisionist framework in turn yielded three paradigmatic idioms: the colonial city (e.g. Beirut under French rule), the dual city (e.g. Rabat under post-Morrocan independence) and the divided city (e.g. Jerusalem since 1967) (Çelik 1997; Fanon 1963). Stressing political economy, colonial governmentality and recently, neo-colonialism (Mitchell 1988, Yacobi and Shechter 2005), these idioms have their own myopic limitations – primarily their tendency to misrecognize inter-communal dynamics at micro-level and to underestimate social networking across ethnic divides. Highlighting exclusion, disenfranchisement and marginality, they are often oblivious to professional collaboration, residential mix and other factors, which nourish and vitalize heterogeneous urban societies.
This panel seeks to break away from this literature and generate innovative research questions to document the formation of these new political subjectivities and collective mobilization (Monterescu 2011). How do urban transformations in the name of neoliberalism (Parker 2008) lead to new political pedagogies, resistance or participatory action? How do cityscapes contribute to new inter-communal and intra-class relations? How do transnational resources and networks, beyond the existing nation-states offer new resources for political mobilization, or potentially also for the eruption of violence? How has the wave of protests in Arab countries or indignados movements contributed to a change in the politicization of public spaces?
Profile of Papers Sought
Extending the problem of ethnic diversity and religious difference to plural cities across the Mediterranean basin and the Middle East, this panel proposes a comparative analysis of political violence, mass mobilization, and inter-communal relations. The panel seeks original empirically or theoretically informed papers that illuminate the changes that have taken place in Mediterranean cityscapes over the last decades, or that document detailed events of these last eighteen months’ protests.
The directors would privilege qualitative studies in the field of contemporary history, urban anthropology, social geography and cultural and political sociology, and which offer a new outlook on the issues of urban diversity and political violence in diverse regions in search of a new future
Topics of particular interest include among others:
- How have the recent urban transformations favored the emergence of new political subjectivities and cross-sectarian alliances?
- What are the most salient traits of political mobilization and the new subjectivities in the context of the Arab revolts? Are they socially divisive or uniting?
- Is post-Islamism (Bayat 2010) a useful category to describe the activism of Muslims or Islamic groupings evolving in these transformed urban landscapes?
- With Agamben (in Parker 2009: 119) it can be argued that “not the tracing of boundaries, but their cancellation or negation is the constitutive act of the city.” How do the 2011 protests inform such definitions of the city?
- Linguistically, how have actors coming from different milieus coped with the challenges of diversity? Likewise, considering the significant ethnic, sectarian or religious differences, how can we theorize emerging urban constellations in relational terms?
- How has the trope of the Mediterranean used to frame the various experiences of protest observed recently?
Bibliography
Abu-Lughod, Janet L. 1980. Rabat, Urban Apartheid in Morocco. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.
Abu Lughod, Janet L. 1987. “The Islamic City--Historic Myth, Islamic Essence, and Contemporary Relevance,” International Jounral of Middle East Studies 19: 155-176
Abu-Lughod, Janet L., and Richard Hay. 1977. Third World Urbanization. Chicago: Maaroufa Press.
Bayat, Asef, 2010. ‘Teheran Paradox City’, New Left Review 66 (Nov.-Dec.): 99-122.
Çelik, Zeynep. 1997. Urban Forms and Colonial Confrontations: Algiers Under French Rule. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Challand, Benoit, 2011. 2011 “The Counter Power of Civil Society and the Emergence of a New Political Imaginary in the Arab World”, Constellations. An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory, Volume 18, No 3, 271-283.
Fanon, Franz. 1963. The Wretched of the Earth. London: Penguin.
Hourani, Albert. 1970. "The Islamic City in the Light of Recent Research." In The Islamic City: A Colloquium, eds. A.H. Hourani and S. M. Stern Hourani. Oxford.
Lefebvre, Henri. 1996. Writings on Cities. Cambridge, Mass: Blackwell.
Mitchell, Timothy. 1988. Colonising Egypt. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Monk, Daniel Bertrand. 2002. An Aesthetic Occupation: The Immediacy of Architecture and the Palestine Conflict. Durham: Duke University Press.
Monterescu, Daniel. 2011. “Estranged Natives and Indigenized Immigrants: A Relational Anthropology of Ethnically Mixed Towns in Israel/Palestine” World Development 39(2): 270-281.
Monterescu, Daniel. (ms.). “Situational Radicalism: The Israeli ‘Arab Spring’ and the (Un)Making of the Rebel City”
Parker, Christopher, 2009. ‘Tunnel-bypasses and minarets of capitalism: Amman as neoliberal assemblage’, Political Geography 28(2): 110-120.
Rabinowitz, Dan, and Daniel Monterescu. 2008. “Reconfiguring the ‘Mixed Town’: Urban Transformations of Ethno-National Relations in Palestine/Israel.” International Journal of Middle East Studies 40:195-226.
Said, Edward. 1979. Orientalism. New York: Routledge.
Slyomovics, Susan. 2001. (ed.), The Walled Arab City in Literature, Architecture and History: The Living Medina in the Maghrib. London and Portland, OR: Frank Cass.
Weber, Max. 1958. The City. Glencoe, Ill: Free Press.
Yacobi, Haim, and Relli Shechter. 2005. “Rethinking cities in the Middle East: political economy, planning, and the lived space.” The Journal of Architecture 10: 499-515.
Daniel Monterescu is assistant professor of urban anthropology at the Central European University in Budapest and a former Marie Curie fellow at the European University Institute in Florence. He received his Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Chicago (2005). Monterescu studies ethnic relations and urban space in binational (mixed) towns as part of a larger project on identity, sociality and gender relations in Mediterranean Cities. His previous projects examine the construction of Arab masculinity and the narration of life stories in Jaffa. His publications feature articles in Public Culture, Identities, World Development, International Journal of Middle East Studies, Journal of Mediterranean Studies, Theory and Criticism and contributions to edited volumes in English, Arabic and Hebrew including Islamic Masculinities (Zed Press), and Re-approaching Borders (Rowman and Littlefield). He is author of Ethno-City: Binational Urbanism in Jaffa (Indiana UP, forthcoming), and of Twilight Nationalism: Tales of Traitorous Identities – a study of autobiographical narratives of Palestinians and Jews in Jaffa (with Haim Hazan, Van Leer Institute, 2011). He is editor (with Dan Rabinowitz) of Mixed Towns, Trapped Communities: Historical Narratives, Spatial Dynamics and Gender Relations in Jewish-Arab Mixed Towns in Israel/Palestine (Ashgate, 2007). The current project entitled “Mediterranean Cities in Conflict” (PEACEMED) is funded by the European Commission.
Benoît Challand is Assistant Professor at New York University (Kevorkian Center for Near East Studies) in New York. He holds a PhD from the European University Institute in Florence (2005) and a Master from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS, London). His relevant publications include the article on the Arab revolts (“The Counter Power of Civil Society and the Emergence of a New Political Imaginary in the Arab World”, Constellations. An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory 18(3), 2011), and the books Palestinian Civil Society. Foreign Donors and the Power to Promote and Exclude (Routledge, 2009) and Le développement, une affaire d’ONG ? Associations, Etats et bailleurs dans le monde arabe, (Paris: Karthala, 2012, co-edited with Caroline Abu-Sada). In the last years, he has taught courses in political sociology and politics at the universities of Bologna, Fribourg (CH), Pavia, Bethlehem, and the New School for Social Research (Politics) at the crossroad of European and Middle Eastern studies. He works in the field of political sociology, with a particular interest Arab politics, religion and identity, and political theory. He has published articles, among other, in International Journal of Middle East Studies, Middle East Studies, European Journal of Social Theory and Religion, State, Society.
Page last updated on 04 September 2018