Afterlives of Revolution: Everyday Counterhistories in Southern Oman,
By Alice Wilson (Stanford University Press, 2023)
Reviewed by Marika Sosnowski, Melbourne Law School
Does a defeated revolution have an afterlife? This is the fundamental question that animates Alice Wilson’s book Afterlives of revolution: Everyday Counterhistories in Southern Oman. In this timely offering, Wilson carefully and critically analyses this question in the context of the little-known insurgency in the southern Omani region of Dhufar. The anti-colonial liberation movement, led by “The Front” against the British-backed Muscat-based al-Busaid dynasty of sultans, officially took place from 1963 until 1976 when it was militarily defeated. The word “officially” is important here. Using this case study, Wilson makes the larger, and crucial point, that while political narratives, historical dates and certain actors try to pin down the protagonists, the dynamics and trajectories of revolution, revolutions are much more than the narrative that regime’s decree or the years history books put in place to supposedly bound them (see also Ghamari-Tabrizi 2016). Revolutions also have a rhythm of the everyday.
Over 6 chapters plus an introduction and conclusion, through in-depth fieldwork in and on delicate topics in a highly sensitive context (for her excellent and reflective methodological discussion see pages 20-29), Wilson beautifully charts these rhythms. She does this through the kinship practices and everyday socialising (chapter 4), occasional extraordinary acts (chapter 5) and acts of unofficial commemoration (chapter 6) that show how the Dhufari revolution outlives its supposed years ‘breaching official silencing imposed by the Omani regime’ (7). Despite the revolution being over in official terms, this book illustrates very clearly how the revolution has an afterlife and what that afterlife looks like. Indeed, as Wilson quotes British diplomat Hugh Boustead as saying, ‘It may be precisely after the revolution that the long struggle for democratization and economic justice will be waged’ (10). At its core, this book is about how even a supposedly defeated revolution can continue to reverberate if we have an eye and ear for counterhistories. In Dhufar, this afterlife comes forward most prominently in the lives of the (ex)revolutionaries Wilson encounters in the form of a deep ideological egalitarianism which is most evident in the way they practice gender roles, marriage and naming, tribal links and social hierarchies.
This focus on the intimate and intricate nature of revolution gels with work by Atef Said (2024), Jessica Winegar (2012) and imprisoned activist Alaa Abdul al-Fatah (2022) on the Egyptian revolution, and Charlotte al-Khalili (2021; 2022; 2023) on the Syrian revolutionary experience. All these authors are interested in similar questions about how revolution plays out in the everyday: how small things like kinship can lend themselves to resistance against domination and exploitation; how children are named after revolutionary figures; marriages are forged along the lines of revolutionary connections; and deeply ingrained taboos are broken in ‘interracial’ marriage and other social egalitarian acts as a way for the revolution to outlive its presumed years (143). How revolution can offer space for relationships, once taboo or off-limits, to be endlessly recalibrated. In Wilson’s field site in southern Oman, these types of egalitarian practices stand out precisely because they diverge from Omani society’s strong social conventions and hierarchies based along gender, tribe, ethnicity, race and social status (238).
The important conceptual contribution to our understanding of revolution is contained in chapter 2. This is that revolutions are “messy” affairs. Wilson points out that, ‘[A]dopting messiness as an analytical framework means avoiding “cookie-cutter” conceptualizations of (revolutionary) social change where precise plans achieve intended outcomes’. This approach shifts our gaze away from conventional narratives of revolution which frame them in terms of “success” or “failure” – where success usually means (male!) protagonists in military fatigues, Che Guevara or more recently Ahmad al Sharaa types, militarily storming the capital and claiming the government. Wilson’s conceptual redirection of revolutions towards their messiness allows us to consider different possibilities and complexities inherent in revolution and the revolutionary experience, their counterhistories and myriad afterlives (64).
I am currently convening a slow scholarship project on the theme of the legal afterlife of war and revolution. As such, Wilson’s focus on the social dimension of revolution and how even supposedly ‘small revolutionary acts’ can nevertheless be ‘just as significant as major events’ (238) and lead to lasting personal transformation has become a key-stone in my evolving thinking about revolutions and their afterlives. For me, this has led to an enlarged understanding that small “r” revolutionary acts can in fact happen any time, any place. They can sneak up on you when you least expect it, in online meetings or over lunch with a friend. When you, or someone else, speaks out against sexism or misogyny. When you, or someone else, is gracious and humble in their fight for rights that should be self-evident. When you, or someone else, is not afraid to let emotion in to show others that this too is part of the inherent messiness of our lives and work. This is because the way that revolution and social change interfaces with bodies, with lives, is never, ever purely academic, and people throughout history have always put their bodies on the line in different ways – small and large – to augur revolutionary change.
Wilson’s book offers scholars a dense analysis of a particular revolution, and its aftermath, in southern Oman. However, I have found its lessons profound and relevant to broader discussions about the revolutionary experience writ large. In a world on the edge of madness, and perhaps already slipped beyond, Wilson’s focus on the counterhistories of the Dhufari revolution, by this I mean on the places, people and stories where we least expect to find the grand dynamics of revolution play out – intimate social moments, kinship networks and relationships – is a welcome and timely contribution. At a time when many of us are worn out by the feeling that our acts must be grand and “make a difference”, Wilson’s book is a hopeful gift to scholarship on revolutions, on social movements more broadly, but also to our lives and practice as academics who care about the world and its workings.
Bibliography
Charlotte al-Khalili, ‘Rethinking the concept of revolution through the Syrian experience’, al-Jumhuriya, 5 May 2021.
Charlotte al-Khalili, ‘Towards and Anthropology of Defeat: Rethinking the Aftermath of the Syrian Revolution’, Condition humaine/Condition politiques, No. 4 2022.
Charlotte al-Khalili (2023) Waiting for the Revolution to End: Syrian displacement, time and subjectivity, UCL Press.
Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi (2016) Foucault in Iran: Islamic Revolution after the Enlightenment, University of Minnesota Press.
Atef Said (2023) Revolution Squared: Tahrir, Political Possibilities, and Counterrevolution in Egypt, Duke University Press.
Jessica Winegar, ‘The Privilege of Revolution: Gender, Class, Space, and Affect in Egypt’, American Ethnologist, vol. 39, no. 1, 2012: 67-70.