Mehrnaz’s Reviews > Revolutionary Life: The Everyday of the Arab Spring > Status Update

[We are the generation of stolen dreams and premature aging.]


تحلیل آصف بیات از نقش جوانان یا به اصلاح Youth politics آنقدر دقیق واکاوی و بررسی شده که خوندنش هم لذت بخشه.

Hannah Arendt proclaimed, “No revolution, no matter how wide it opened its gates to the masses and the downtrodden … was ever started by them.”

گاها فکر می‌کنم انقلاب در معنای واقعی و قدیمی خود، در عصر شتاب‌زده‌ی تکنولوژیک و از هم‌گسیخته پساپسا(!) مدرنیته امکان‌پذیر نیست.

While the revolutionaries battled the police, built barricades, and dodged tear gas canisters, the square vendors carried on with their routine of trading hot tea, cold drinks, food, flags, and badges. The vendors became an integral element in Tahrir’s spatiopolitical fabric, selling watermelons carved with slogans such as “Down with Military Rule” or drinks with names such as “January 25 Tea”,“Tahrir Licorice Juice.

"In a patriarchal society where women are expected to mind their domestic business in managing the home and raising children, their powerful march in the streets, side by side with men, would itself signal a turning point of equality. It empowers the uprising and enrages the moral and political authority who may in response inflict moral charge, body abuse, and sexual violence."

When the lawyer activist Nehad Abou El-Komsan marched to Tahrir, despite the suffocating tear gas covering the air, “I was engulfed by a form of happiness that I had never known before in my life.… I wanted to stay in the square and never leave it.”

In 2009, some 150,000 Zabaleen, self-employed garbage collectors in Cairo, refused to collect 8,000 tons of daily garbage (60 percent of the total daily waste) because the government slaughter of 300,000 swine (allegedly for health reasons) had made recycling the waste upon which the Zabaleen depended formidable.

“People were so fed up with politics that the idea of being organized was somehow rejected”

یکی از چیزهای که نوشته‌های آصف بیات را نسبت به دیگر تئوریسین‌های مطالعات انقلاب جذاب‌تر میکند، ترکیب نحوه‌ی جمع‌آوری داده‌ها است‌. او همزمان با بک‌گراندِ قوی تئوریک خود و دانش بومی تاریخی، از مصاحبه‌های عمیق برای تحلیل انقلاب‌ها (یا جنبش‌ها) بهره می‌گیرد. این مصاحبه‌های عمیق نه تنها دقیق و ساختارمند هستند بلکه با گستردگی زیاد و تفاوت‌های مختلف انتخاب شده‌اند.

Popular protests become a revolutionary uprising “revolution as movement” when the diverse constituencies come to eclipse their particularistic claims in favor of broader calls for greater good for all __dignity, democracy, or justice. A revolutionary spirit arises when these social groups temporarily cease to be workers, women, or ethnic minorities and become equal parts of a singular entity they call the people.

Asef Bayat points out how forming a public/pseudo public sphere, something he calls "under-societies" could actually create a counter-public revolutionary front for daily practices. To him, the everyday life of revolutionaries consists of daily struggles to change interpersonal relationships which are heavily dominated by the current social order (exact same thing that Gramsci called a permanent resistance).