Tunisian Protestscapes

Abstract

Abstract This chapter lays out the book’s main theoretical framework. Conceptualizing Tunisians as the “missing people,” peuple introuvable, and “the part that has no part,” it offers the notion of peoplehood forged through anti-authoritarian insurgency and disobedience. The chapter then presents “protestscapes” as an epistemology of studying Tunisian protest and revolution. These “moving snapshots,” aid in the dis-assembling of situated, partial components of Tunisia’s revolution. This dis-assembling of revolution into its synchronies/spatialities is key to re-assembling it as transhistorical (a diachrony/temporality). Protestscapes are incubated within spatialities, aiding in the interpretation of revolution’s sociality and materiality. They disclose the emancipatory activisms of Tunisia’s marginals and indignants. Understanding revolution via protestscapes gives concrete shape to the overall agentic, affective, and cognitive maturation of peoplehood bottom-up. The analysis links resistance and social doing to the rise of peoplehood, the nemesis of “counter-revolution,” which marked the onset of postcolonial state-building and nationalism immediately after independence.