Book cover for Revolution Beyond the Event

Publication date: 2 May 2023

DOI: https://doi.org/10.14324/111.9781800081185

Number of illustrations: 11

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License

Revolution Beyond the Event

The afterlives of radical politics

Charlotte Al-Khalili (Editor), Narges Ansari (Editor), Myriam Lamrani (Editor), Kaya Uzel (Editor)

Revolution Beyond the Event brings together leading international anthropologists alongside emerging scholars to examine revolutionary legacies from the MENA region, Latin America and the Caribbean. It explores the idea that revolutions have varied afterlives that complicate the assumptions about their duration, pace and progression, and argues that a renewed focus on the temporality of radical politics is essential to our understanding of revolution. Approaching revolution through its relationship to time, the book is a critical intervention into attempts to define revolutions as bounded events that act as sequential transitions from one political system to another. It pursues an ethnographically driven rethinking of the temporal horizons that are at stake in revolutionary processes, arguing that linear views of revolution are inextricably tied to notions of progress and modernity. Through a careful selection of case studies, the book provides a critical perspective on the lived realities of revolutionary afterlives, challenging the liberal humanist assumptions implicit in the ‘modern’ idea of revolution, and reappraising the political agency of people caught up in revolutionary situations across a variety of ethnographic contexts.

List of figures
Notes on contributors
Acknowledgements

Introduction
Charlotte Al-Khalili, Narges Ansari, Myriam Lamrani, Kaya Uzel

PART 1: The Shifting Grounds of Revolutionary Temporality

1. The Remains of Revolution: Disagreements about Revolutionary Failure in Nicaragua
David Cooper

2. Picturing Absence in Post˗Revolutionary Yemen
Gabriele vom Bruck

3. Smoking, Praying, Killing: The Politics of Boredom in Post-Revolutionary Libya
Igor Cherstich

4. Religious Transformations after the 1979 Iranian Revolution: From Imam Hussein as Exemplar Back to Intercessor
Mary Elaine Hegland

PART 2: Rethinking Revolutionary Afterlives: Anthropology and Beyond

5. The ‘Revolution Before the Revolution’: Radical Organizing Across the Longue Durée in Twentieth Century Peru
David Nugent

6. Cosmogony and Second Nature in Revolutionary Cuba
Martin Holbraad

7. On the Question of Optimism in Troubled Times: Revolution, Tragedy and Possibility in Caribbean History
Brian Meeks

Index

Afterword
Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi

Index

DOI: 10.14324/111.9781800081185

Number of illustrations: 11

Publication date: 02 May 2023

PDF ISBN: 9781800081185

EPUB ISBN: 9781800081215

Hardback ISBN: 9781800081208

Paperback ISBN: 9781800081192

Charlotte Al-Khalili (Editor)

Charlotte Al-Khalili is a Leverhulme Early Career fellow in anthropology at the University of Sussex. Her work focuses on revolutionary politics and subjectivities and religious temporalities and practices in Syria and Turkey. Her research explores the effects of the 2011 revolution and its aftermaths on displaced Syrians’ lifeworlds and examines Syrians’ evolving understandings, imagination and conceptualizations of revolution and displacement. She is the co-editor of the Revolution Beyond the Event (UCL, 2023).

Narges Ansari (Editor)

Narges Ansari is a social anthropologist whose doctoral thesis, funded by ERC studentship, considers conceptions of agency and subjectivity within Shi’a rituals of mediation in the revolutionary and post-revolutionary context of Iran (UCL Anthropology 2022). She is the 2022 recipient of British Society of Middle Eastern Studies Early Career Development Prize.

Myriam Lamrani (Editor)

Myriam Lamrani is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Global Fellow at Harvard University and at Panteion University. She currently researches devotional and political imagery in Greece and Mexico. She was awarded the J.B. Donne Essay Prize on the Anthropology of Art (2019) of the Royal Anthropological Institute. Her work was published by the American Ethnologist (2022).

Kaya Uzel (Editor)

Kaya Uzel is a PhD-candidate in anthropology at UCL whose research into the aftermath of Burkina Faso’s 1983 revolution under Thomas Sankara has been funded by an interdisciplinary ESRC/AHRC studentship. Kaya has been teaching in the Anthropology departments at UCL and Goldsmiths College, University of London, since 2018.

‘a significant intervention in the comparative studies of revolutions’
Journal of Anthropological Research

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Revolution Beyond the Event

The afterlives of radical politics

Publication date: May 2, 2023

Open Access PDF ISBN: 9781800081185

Paperback ISBN: 9781800081192

Hardback ISBN: 9781800081208

Trim size (hardback): 23.4cm x 15.6cm

Trim size (paperback): 23.4cm x 15.6cm

Download free PDF online

https://uclpress.co.uk/book/revolution-beyond-the-event/

Revolution Beyond the Event brings together leading international anthropologists alongside emerging scholars to examine revolutionary legacies from the MENA region, Latin America and the Caribbean. It explores the idea that revolutions have varied afterlives that complicate the assumptions about their duration, pace and progression, and argues that a renewed focus on the temporality of radical politics is essential to our understanding of revolution. Approaching revolution through its relationship to time, the book is a critical intervention into attempts to define revolutions as bounded events that act as sequential transitions from one political system to another. It pursues an ethnographically driven rethinking of the temporal horizons that are at stake in revolutionary processes, arguing that linear views of revolution are inextricably tied to notions of progress and modernity. Through a careful selection of case studies, the book provides a critical perspective on the lived realities of revolutionary afterlives, challenging the liberal humanist assumptions implicit in the ‘modern’ idea of revolution, and reappraising the political agency of people caught up in revolutionary situations across a variety of ethnographic contexts.

‘a significant intervention in the comparative studies of revolutions’
Journal of Anthropological Research

Narges Ansari (B01)

Narges Ansari is a social anthropologist whose doctoral thesis, funded by ERC studentship, considers conceptions of agency and subjectivity within Shi’a rituals of mediation in the revolutionary and post-revolutionary context of Iran (UCL Anthropology 2022). She is the 2022 recipient of British Society of Middle Eastern Studies Early Career Development Prize.

Myriam Lamrani (B01)

Myriam Lamrani is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Global Fellow at Harvard University and at Panteion University. She currently researches devotional and political imagery in Greece and Mexico. She was awarded the J.B. Donne Essay Prize on the Anthropology of Art (2019) of the Royal Anthropological Institute. Her work was published by the American Ethnologist (2022).

Kaya Uzel (B01)

Kaya Uzel is a PhD-candidate in anthropology at UCL whose research into the aftermath of Burkina Faso’s 1983 revolution under Thomas Sankara has been funded by an interdisciplinary ESRC/AHRC studentship. Kaya has been teaching in the Anthropology departments at UCL and Goldsmiths College, University of London, since 2018.

Charlotte Al-Khalili (B01)

Charlotte Al-Khalili is a Leverhulme Early Career fellow in anthropology at the University of Sussex. Her work focuses on revolutionary politics and subjectivities and religious temporalities and practices in Syria and Turkey. Her research explores the effects of the 2011 revolution and its aftermaths on displaced Syrians’ lifeworlds and examines Syrians’ evolving understandings, imagination and conceptualizations of revolution and displacement. She is the co-editor of the Revolution Beyond the Event (UCL, 2023).