Abstract
AbstractIn 1991, barricades in the streets of Rīga, Latvia, shielded important landmarks from Soviet military units looking to prevent the dissolution of the USSR; in 2006, barricades in the streets of Oaxaca, Mexico, defended members of the Popular Assembly of the Peoples of Oaxaca from paramilitary incursions. We employ these two cases to compare the historically specific public socialities and politics formed through spatial and material practices in moments of crisis and in their aftermath. We show how the barricades continue to animate social and political formations and imaginaries, providing a sense of both past solidarity and future possibilities against which the present, including the state of the polity and the life of the people, are assessed. We trace the convergences and differences of political imaginaries of barricade sociality that formed in the barricades’ aftermath and consider what their transformative potential might be. Attentive to the specificity of particular practices and social relations that produce a collective subject, we consider how our case studies might inform broader questions about social collectives like the nation and publics. Though they point in different directions, we argue that the barricades provide an enabling position from which to imagine and organize collective life otherwise. In a moment when much mainstream political activism remains spellbound by the allure of discourses of democracy that promise power to the people, the Mexico and Latvia cases provide examples of social life that exceeded both state-based notions of collectives and what Michael Warner has called “state-based thinking,” even as they were also entangled with state-based frames.
Highlights
Though, that Laclau’s analysis rhetoricizes the political and does not consider the political force of concrete material practices of protest and the ways they contribute to the articulation of the collective subject of the people
We show that the building and maintaining of barricades produced an affective and visceral togetherness—or a barricade sociality—that articulated the collective political subject of the people
Though organized in relation to antagonisms with the ruling regime, we argue that the transformative potential of the people as produced by barricade sociality extended beyond its antagonistic relation to a particular state in Latvia or a particular political regime in Oaxaca to encompass a broader critique of modern political forms and practices of governing
Summary
Throughout the first months of 2011, Tahrir Square in Cairo vibrated with what seemed like the new collective consciousness of a revolutionary movement sweeping the Middle East. Dubbed the “Arab Spring,” the protests that erupted in Algeria, Lebanon, Jordan, Oman, Egypt, Syria, Yemen, Bahrain, and Libya following Tunisians’ successful overthrow of their president have produced impassioned debates from commentators about how these revolutionary sentiments emerged and what possibilities, as well as risks, they entail. Assessing Egypt’s future after the overthrow of Hosni Mubarak’s regime, many liberals in the West have questioned whether Egypt will implement a liberal democracy or whether a totalitarian and religious state will emerge from the ashes of Mubarak’s government. Anthropologists such as Talal Asad have cautioned against conceiving of Egypt’s political future in terms of a juxtaposition of religion and secularism, noting instead that
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