Hospitality's Prowess: Performing Sahrāwī Sovereignty in Refugee Camps

Abstract

AbstractThe Sahrāwī movement for national liberation—known as the Polisario Front—has been organizing into the Sahrāwī Arab Democratic Republic in refugee camps since 1976. This article describes rhetorical and administrative strategies that muster the labor of hospitality carried out in Sahrāwī households to advance the legitimacy of the Polisario Front. The khayma (tent, household, or family), a customary domain of female power and symbol of hospitality among the Sahrāwī (and beyond), bears a metonymic relationship with the project of a Sahrāwī revolutionary nationalism. Examining how hospitality serves as a nexus of articulation between different orders of the political, it argues that practices of hospitality among Sahrāwī refugees constitute the expression of a form of popular sovereignty and revolutionary practice.