John Chalcraft

ENGAGING THE STATE: PEASANTS AND PETITIONS IN EGYPT ON THE EVE OF COLONIAL RULE

In spite of many competing views on peasants, their politics, and the state in 19th-century Egypt, the historiography contains certain striking continuities in its understanding of peasant–state political relations. Historians influenced by Marxism, modernization theory, and nationalism alike have usually seen state and peasantry as sharply distinct and conflicting. Peasants have often been depicted as locked in a struggle against the penetration of state agency into a previously autonomous rural domain. Whether seen as a force for benevolent modernization or for the predatory extraction of conscripts and taxes, the state has regularly been viewed as self-propelled and sui generis, reforming or invading the world of an either passive, silently subversive, or violently revolutionary peasantry. The figure of the tradition-bound, submissive, or apathetic peasant simply marks out a terrain for state agency, albeit an agency obstructed by peasant hostility, irrationality, or resentment. The silently subversive peasant, further, who uses James C. Scotts “weapons of the weak,” merely undermines in antagonistic and wordless fashion projects emanating from above. The revolutionary peasant, finally, becomes the self-generating locus of the nationalist or socialist modern and seeks the violent overthrow of the predatory state, transforming the latter into only the negative—albeit treacherous—terrain on which the positive historical agency of peasants and their allies can work. In short, the existing historiography, while varying the historical role, value, and meaning of peasant and state, preserves both as radically distinct, self-creating, and self-defining collective agents involved in zero-sum and often violent antagonism.

Migration and popular protest in the Arabian Peninsula and the Gulf in the 1950s and 1960s

The conventional historiography on popular and labor protest in the Arabian peninsula and the Gulf since the Second World War tends to ascribe a negative role to migration. Migrants—dragooned into the service of expanding oil economies—are often depicted as undermining the cohesion and efficacy of indigenous labor activism and popular protest. This article adopts a different perspective. It revisits the most important twentieth-century wave of pan-Arab, secular, republican, and socialist protest in the region—that of the 1950s and 1960s—and highlights the positive contribution migrants made. They were not just quotients of labor power, but interpretive and political subjects. Palestinians, Yemenis, and others, along with return- and circular-migrants, exiles, and visitors, transmitted pan-Arab and Leftist ideas, helped build activist organizations, and participated in a variety of protests. I suggest that standard forms of endogenous socioeconomic determinism in the labor history of the region need rethinking.

Counterhegemony in the colony and postcolony

Introduction J.Chalcraft & Y.Noorani PART I: THE STATE AND POLITICS: NATIONALISM AND REVOLUTION Hegemony, Counterhegemony and the Mexican Revolution A.Knight The Fetishism of Identity: Empire, Nation, and the Politics of Subjectivity in Algeria J.McDougall PART II: INTELLECTUAL FORMATIONS: AUTHORITY AND OPPOSITION Redefining Resistance: Counterhegemony, the Repressive Hypothesis and the Case of Arabic Modernism Y.Noorani Hegemony and Liberation: Mao Zedong and Zou Taofen in Early Twentieth-Century China R.Mitter The Road through Africa: Imperial Nationalism and Diasporic Racial Consciousness in Postslavery Barbados M.Newton PART III: COUNTERCULTURE: NORMATIVE TENSION AND AMBIGUITY Reading, Hegemony and Counterhegemony in the Late Ottoman Empire and Early Turkish Republic B.C. Fortna Celebratory Ramadan and Hyperpiety in a Mexican Standoff: Counterhegemony in the Crossfire W.Armbrust PART IV: POPULAR STRUGGLE: MANOEUVRE AND CONTESTATION Counterhegemonic Effects: Weighing, Measuring, Petitions, and Bureaucracy in Nineteenth Century Egypt J.Chalcraft Hegemony from Below: Print Workers, the State, and the Communist Party in Peru, 1920-1940 P.Drinot The Politics of Institutional Subversion: Organized Labour and Resistance in Zambia A.LeBas How do Activists Act? Conceiving Counterhegemony in Durban S.Chari

Labour Protest and Hegemony in Egypt and the Arabian Peninsula

William Sewell’s (1993) article ‘Towards a Post-Materialist Rhetoric for Labour History’ challenged labour historians to abandon their basic economistic conviction that the arena of production and exchange was a uniquely material one. He cogently suggested that ‘we must imagine a worldin which every social relationship is simultaneously constituted bymeaning, scarcity and by power’ (ibid.: 34). Recent, significant, but under-reported rounds of labour protest in Egypt (since 2004) and in the countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) (since 2005), however, can easily be read in a way that repeats rather than revises standard materialist premises in the labour historiography of North Africa and South West Asia. It is tempting to argue that intensifying capitalist globalization has led automatically to protests from below as workers suffer higher rates of exploitation, objectively defined. But even the most basic reminder that oppression and exploitation sometimes demobilize, and at other times spark collective action, indicates the inadequacy of mechanistic analyses. This chapter aims to respond to Sewell’s challenge by outlining how old and new movements of labour protest in Egypt and the Arabian Peninsula can be understood in terms of hegemonic contestation.

Question: What Are the Fruitful New Directions in Subaltern Studies, and How Can Those Working in Middle East Studies Most Productively Engage With Them?

More than twenty-five years ago, a small group of South Asianists challenged the bourgeois-nationalist and colonialist historiography of Indian nationalism. Based mostly in India and critical of “economistic” Marxism, they aimed to recover the occluded histories of what Antonio Gramsci calls “subaltern social groups” and to put into question the relations of power, subordination, and “inferior rank” more generally. The influence of subaltern studies quickly became international, inspiring research projects in Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, Latin America, and the Middle East.

Popular Movements in the Middle East and North Africa

Against top-down or one-dimensional histories, this chapter draws attention to the importance and the variety of popular movements in the Middle East and North Africa since the eighteenth century. Resistance has occurred at multiple scales, from the anti-imperial to the domestic, and involved everyday forms as well as collective confrontations, abstract ideology as well as proverbial wisdom, religiosity and secularism, organization and spontaneity, and armed struggle, civil disobedience, and persuasion. The chapter advances a four part periodization to identify change over time, and situates protest movements in geopolitical, political, socio-economic, and cultural contexts. While the cultural essentialism and exceptionalism of (neo)Orientalism is rejected, the main goal of the chapter is to challenge socioeconomic determinism and modernist teleology. Emphasized are geopolitical, political, and ideational dynamics, including the machinations of external and regional powers, the location and role of the state and political contestation, and the role of intellectual labour. Activism is not seen in developmentalist terms, but as jagged with peaks and troughs; form and content change over time; consciousness does not simply expand: ideas are forgotten, as well as re-discovered or developed anew. Rather than seeing the national context as the natural one for the history of popular movements, the chapter pays attention to the trans-local, illustrating throughout some of the ways in which transversal ties between non-state actors have been at play in popular movements. The chapter aims, finally, to foreground the movements of subaltern social groups compared to middle class or elite-based collective action. Overall, the chapter aims to show that popular movements are not epiphenomenal, but an integral part of the region’s history.