Past event
Afterlives of Revolution: Everyday Counterhistories in Southern Oman MECACS Event
Title: “Afterlives of Revolution: Everyday Counterhistories in Southern Oman”
Precis:
“The Dhufar Revolution was fought between 1965-1976 in an attempt to depose Oman's British-backed Sultan and advance social ideals of egalitarianism and gender equality. But following counterinsurgency victory, Oman's government expunged the revolution from sanctioned historical narratives. Alice Wilson considers the ‘social afterlives' of revolutionary values and networks and how veteran militants have used kinship and daily socializing to reproduce networks of social egalitarianism and commemorate the revolution in unofficial ways. Recognizing that those typically depicted as coopted can still reproduce counterhegemonic values, Afterlives of Revolution illuminates a condition all too common across Southwest Asia and North Africa: the experience of defeated revolutionaries living under the authoritarian state they once contested.”
Bio:
“Alice Wilson is Senior Lecturer in Anthropology at the University of Sussex. Her research focuses on transformations in the relationship between governing authorities and governed constituencies in revolutions and liberation movements in Southwest Asia and North Africa, in particular in Western Sahara and Oman. She is the author of Afterlives of Revolution: Everyday Counterhistories in Southern Oman (Stanford, 2023) and Sovereignty in Exile: a Saharan Liberation Movement Governs (Pennsylvania, 2016). Sovereignty in Exile won Honorable mention in the 2017 American Anthropological Association Middle East Section Book Award.”