Afterlives of Revolution: Everyday Counterhistories in Southern Oman

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. In her latest book, Afterlives of Revolution, Alice Wilson considers the 'social afterlives' of revolutionary values and networks and how veteran militants have used kinship and daily socializing to reproduce networks of social egalitarianism and commemorate the revolution in unofficial ways.

The Takhayyul Project joins the author, Alice Wilson, and researcher Marral Shamshiri, to discuss the book and the broader role of empire and social imaginaries in the context of revolution. All members of the public are cordially invited.

About the speakers

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). Sovereignty in Exile won Honorable mention in the 2017 American Anthropological Association Middle East Section Book Award.

Marral Shamshiri is a PhD candidate in international history at LSE, working on the transnational and political connections between Iranian and Arab revolutionary movements in the long 1960s and 1970s. She is co-editor of the book She Who Struggles: Revolutionary Women Who Shaped the World (Pluto, 2023). Her recent work has been published in Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East (CSSAAME), History Workshop magazine, Kohl: a Journal for Body and Gender Research, Revolutionary Papers, Silver Press blog, and The Fate of Third Worldism in the Middle East (Oneworld, 2024).

Accessibility

An access guide to Roberts Building, Lecture Theatre 309 can be found on AccessAble.

About TAKHAYYUL

TAKHAYYUL is a collaborative research project that will ethnographically excavate the imaginative forces in the formation of populist religious aspirations in the interconnected geographies recently coined as the Balkan-to-Bengal complex - namely the Balkans, the Middle East, and South Asia.