In December 2010 an out-of-work Tunisian street vendor, Mohamed Bouazizi, set himself on fire and precipitated the Arab Spring. Popular interpretations of Bouazizi's self-immolation presented economic and political oppression by the Ben Ali regimes as the root causes of widespread social despair that triggered the Tunisian revolution. Yet as Julia Clancy-Smith points out, Tunisia's long history of organized political activism and protest movements suggests a far more complicated set of processes. Proposing a conceptual framework of "coastalization" vs. "interiorization," Clancy-Smith examines Tunisia's last two centuries and demonstrates how geographical and environmental and social factors also lie behind that country's modern political history. Within this framework Clancy-Smith explores how Tunisia's coast became a Mediterranean playground for transnational elites, a mecca of tourism, while its interior agrarian regions suffered increasing neglect and marginalization. This distinction has had a profound impact on the fate of Tunisia and has manifested itself in divisive debates over politics, the state, and religion as well as women’s socio-legal status that have led to a series of mass civic actions culminating in revolution. Clancy-Smith proposes a fresh historical lens through which to view the relationship between spacial displacements, regionalization, and transnationalism.
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Table of Contents
Introduction
1. Preludes and Postscripts: Of Baguettes and Social Protest
2. Coastalization: Agriculture, Colonialism, and the Granary of Rome
3. Coastalization and Globalization: Tourism, Profane and Sacred
4. Mediterranean Women, Politics, and Islam
5. Mediterranean Games, Politics, and Dissent
6. From Sidi Bou Saʿid to Sidi Bouzid: Targets and Symbols
Conclusion
Notes
About the Author
Julia Clancy-Smith is professor of history at the University of Arizona. She is the coauthor of The Modern Middle East and North Africa: A History in Documents and author of Mediterraneans: North Africa and Europe in an Age of Migration and Rebel and Saint: Muslim Notables, Populist Protest, Colonial Encounters.
