When the pro-democracy protests broke out in Egypt in January 2011, a remarkable sense of non-violent collectivity emerged in the public spaces of the country and beyond. Tahrir Square became the epicenter of a revolution and a public space of civic gathering. With this seismic event as its starting point, Public Space and Revolt stages a theoretical discussion on the definitions and redefinitions of the political-including political struggle, political subjectivity, political space, political actors, political responsibility-and their connections with notions of social justice, public gathering, and moral responsibility. In this context, the political is explored as an embodied enactment and with regards to its multiple implications in gender performativity and kinship law. This volume also addresses questions of media documentation, archiving and witnessing related to the poetics of the uprising.
Bringing together experts from a range of fields, including anthropology, history, politics, gender studies, literature, and philosophy, this volume raises several central questions, including: How was Tahrir's embodied collectivity achieved and, further, how did those bodies in unison manage to extend the space and time of the revolution to the rest of the world? What was the role of the youth and how did they form and extend the revolutionary praxis beyond Cairo and into every village? What was revolutionary about their moral language of responsibility and community welfare? How did Tahrir's revolution enact and negotiate religious and gender difference? How was the revolution archived and yet how did it remain alive? What was the connection between the revolutionary and the poetic? What would the significance of Tahrir's revolution be in thinking the political struggle in the context of colonial and postcolonial African societies? How will the emancipatory Tahrir be translated into a new social order? Public Space and Revolt will appeal to scholars and students of Political Philosophy, History, Cultural Studies, Gender Studies, and Social Anthropology.