Cambridge Scholars Press has just published a new book on the Archaeology of Politics edited by Peter Johansen and Andrew Bauer. The volume is an important new statement in the newly emerging archaeology of the political that will be a recurring theme of many of the issues I’ll be interested in sharing here: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. As my first post to Assemblages, here is an excerpt from my concluding chapter in Johansen and Bauer’s volume.
On December 17, 2010, a policewoman in the Tunisian city of Sidi Bouzid, 300km south of Tunis, confiscated an unlicensed produce cart from twenty-six year old Mohamed Bouazizi, the sole income earner in a large extended family. Humiliated by the brutality of the police and the imperious disregard of local officials, Bouazizi set himself on fire in front of the headquarters of the provincial government. This act of spontaneous self-immolation sparked riots across Tunisia that ultimately cascaded into popular uprisings across northeast Africa and the Middle East. By spring 2011, governments had fallen in Tunisia and Egypt, crackdowns against mass demonstrations preoccupied authorities in Iran, Yemen, and Bahrain, and Libya had collapsed into a violent civil war.
It is hard to imagine a more quotidian beginning to regional revolution than a confrontation over a produce cart that spiraled into a popular movement to renegotiate the terms of political association. Yet the 2011 uprisings did just that, following on a series of mass movements that have convulsed the early years of the new millennium (e.g., Serbia 2000, Georgia 2003, Ukraine 2004, Lebanon 2005, Kyrgyzstan 2005, Iran 2009), struggles—some successful, some not—that sought to redefine the limits of sovereignty and fundamentally re-order relations of authorization and subjection. Yet the episode that sparked Tunisia’s Jasmine Revolution neatly encapsulates the central theoretical contention of the present volume, revealing how the political is located in a broad array of practices that are mediated by dense, and often surprising, material assemblages.