Halted narratives: The combative futurity of Sahrawi female militant’s public memory

Abstract

ABSTRACT Since 1976, the Sahrawi national liberation movement known as the Polisario Front anticipates state sovereignty in Western Sahara by organizing into the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic (SADR) in Southern Algeria. Drawing on excerpts from the life-histories of six Sahrawi women who contributed to build the SADR’s early social and physical infrastructures, this paper presents practices of public remembrance as coextensive to a history-making labour of social regeneration that seeks international recognition for the Sahrawi nation, as well as to pass on nationalist moral values and political desire across time. The life-worlds of the Sahrawi generation these six women belong to have undergone considerable structural changes brought about by Spanish colonialism, the emergence of the Polisario Front in the 1970s, war, forced displacement, and a 1991 UN mediated ceasefire. Highlighting the on-going vitality of anticolonial nationalisms, this paper offers an account of how elderly Sahrawi female militants seek to socially regenerate the project of a Sahrawi revolutionary nationalism through their production of history.