Afterlives of Revolution: Everyday Counterhistories in Southern Oman
Dr Alice Wilson (University of Sussex)
The Dhufar Revolution was fought between 1965-1976 in an attempt to depose Oman's British-backed Sultan and advance social ideals of egalitarianism and gender equality. But following counterinsurgency victory, Oman's government expunged the revolution from sanctioned historical narratives. Ethnographic research with former revolutionaries in postwar Oman nevertheless foregrounds the "social afterlives" of surviving revolutionary values in kinship, daily socializing and unofficial commemoration. Showing how those typically depicted as coopted can still reproduce counterhegemonic values, these findings challenge conventional narratives of revolution, counterinsurgency and their aftermaths.
Alice Wilson is Senior Lecturer in Anthropology at the University of Sussex. Her research focuses on transformations in the relationship between governing authorities and governed constituencies in revolutions and liberation movements in Southwest Asia and North Africa, in particular in Western Sahara and Oman. She is the author of Afterlives of Revolution: Everyday Counterhistories in Southern Oman (Stanford, 2023) and Sovereignty in Exile: a Saharan Liberation Movement Governs (Pennsylvania, 2016). Afterlives of Revolution is under contract to be translated into Arabic with Dar Soual, Beirut. Sovereignty in Exile won Honorable mention in the 2017 American Anthropological Association Middle East Section Book Award.