Institut de Recherche sur le Maghreb Contemporain

Research on the second-hand clothes trade has focused on global value chains and transnational circulations from the Global North to the Global South. This article instead investigates the circulation of a ubiquitous and highly popular second-hand commodity, namely shoes, in the Tunisian capital city Tunis. The second-hand materials – referred to as “fripe” in Tunisia – that arrive in the Tunis cargo port have been donated or discarded in their countries of origin and their commodity value is thus uncertain. In addition, second-hand shoes are officially banned from sale on the Tunisian market. In order to explain how fripe shoes are nevertheless transferred into new commodity situations in Tunis, this article hones in on processes of valuation at the urban scale. Three locations that feature prominently in the urban trajectory of second-hand shoes – a sorting factory, the wholesale quarter, and a specialised market street – are examined as distinct sites for valuation that enable the renewed circulation of fripe shoes in the city. Investigating valuation and circulation with an explicit focus on urban space demonstrates how such processes not only transform fripe objects in circulation, but are also constitutive of socio-spatial relations: At times, valuation becomes manifest in urban form, or situated urban change; At other times, fripe shoe circulations generate linkages and interdependencies that tie seemingly bounded sites of valuation to diverse actors and spaces across the city. As inherently contested commodity form, second-hand shoes thus provide insight into the complex social and political negotiations that define commodity circulation as both contingent and productive urban process.

Empezando desde una perspectiva histórica sobre el activismo de las mujeres en Túnez, este artículo analiza la agencia de las asociaciones femeninas durante y después de los levantamientos de 2011. Esta contribuyó a que Túnez fuera considerada la única transición democrática “prometedora” entre las llamadas Primaveras Árabes. A través de un análisis de documentos y entrevistas, se investiga el apoyo de la UE a estas asociaciones, con un doble objetivo. Primero, deconstruir la narrativa estereotipada occidental (Mohanty, 1999) acerca de las mujeres tunecinas. En segundo lugar, investigar cómo esta narrativa influencia el apoyo de la UE a las asociaciones de mujeres en Túnez, y en consecuencia, a su transición democrática en general. Por lo tanto, el objetivo es cuestionar el enfoque europeo de la vecindad sur y la “metanarrativa” (Cebeci, 2012) que se ha construido sobre ello a lo largo de los años.

While a number of investigations have examined how gay Muslim men view homosexuality in relation to religious Western homophobia, this research constitutes the first account of the experiences of self-identified gay men living in an African, Muslim nation, where same-sex sex is both illegal and actively persecuted. We interviewed 28 gay men living in Tunisia in order to understand how they assimilate their sexual, religious and ethnic identities within a highly homophobic culture. Utilizing notions of homoerasure and homohysteria (McCormack and Eric Anderson ,b), and examining the intersection of identity conflict and new social movement theory, we highlight four strategies that participants use to negotiate the dissonance of living with conflicting identities in a context of religious homophobia: (1) privileging their Islamic identities and rejecting homosexuality as a legitimate sexual identity; (2) rejecting Islam and accepting homosexuality as a legitimate sexual identity; (3) interpreting Islam to be supportive of homosexuality; and (4) creating a non-penetrative homosexuality to be compatible with literal Qur'anic interpretations. We discuss the multiple difficulties these men face in relation to religious intolerance and ethnic heteronormativity, and reflect upon the possibilities and obstacles of using Western identity politics towards the promotion of social justice within a framework of growing homohysteria.

The drive for flexibility was already a fait accompli at a bilateral level, long before the entry into force of the 1999 Treaty of Amsterdam which empowered the Union to negotiate and conclude formal EU readmission agreements with third countries. This chapter sets out to demonstrate that the drive for flexibility has also become a fait accompli at the EU level, seven years after the 2009 entry into force of the Treaty of Lisbon. The implications stemming from the drive for flexibility are critically examined with reference to the various EU domestic factors that motivated the European Commission.

The article analyzes the ways in which the term “cultural diversity” has become a hegemonic discourse for both the state and political activists in Tunisia. This process, initiated since the independence, has taken a new impetus with the end of the authoritarian regime permitted by the Tunisian revolution in 2011. The article examines the politicization of the issue of diversity in Tunisia and its inclusion in the new narratives of the nation after 2011. In order to do so, it focuses on three aspects of the neodiversity in Tunisia: the claims for the recognition of the Amazigh culture, the struggle against racial discrimination against the black population, and the renewed Africanism—or belonging to a so-called African space.

How can one really get involved in any given society without mastery of its language? This seemingly innocuous question, which refers to modes of political participation, sheds light on the cornerstone of political participation for “Tunisians abroad.” Beyond that, it also highlights their alternative relation to the local Tunisian colloquial/vernacular. While this relationship may at times enhance their status as outsiders, it also enables them to shift the goal posts of national borders. Building on this hypothesis, the paper analyses the uses of language by two groups from the diaspora which have risen to power: the diaspora of exiles and the ‘brain-drain’ diaspora. Regarding the former, exclusive socialization for decades in their country of exile has meant they have adopted new languages and use different variants of the Arabic language, which they learn through encounters with militants and other people, from North Africa to the Middle East. This paper argues that this unprecedented situation renders the old binary opposition between secular Francophones and Islamist Arabic speakers more complex. The brain-drain diaspora represents another facet of the power nexus in Tunisia:  many of its elements have since “returned” to take over the current technocratic government, and have also developed a different relationship with language, which has impacted upon both the codes of politics and identity codes in Tunisian society.

Never recognized as official languages, the Berber languages have borrowed their written scripts according to the various political systems and cultures they came in contact with. This paper explores the different scripts that have been used to write the Berber languages and tries to search for their underlying intellectual and political filiations. The appropriation of the Latin script, the acquisition or abandonment of the Arabic script stand out as landmarks in the history of these languages, often perceived as one language. Today in Morocco, the Berber identity claim - known as amazigh - tends to cut itself from the Muslim heritage by adopting a specific Berber script conceptualized as indigenous and pre-Islamic. By doing so, this movement refuses the ethnicization of Islam, i.e. its monopolization by one culture and one language: Arabic. This cultural choice is primarily a political stand : the opposition toward the presence of Islam through state policies and instiututions and the wish to restore cultural diversity denied by the post-colonial national construction. This new set-up allows the inscription of amazigh in the Libyc and African areas as well as in the Tamazgha territories (i.e. the whole Berber-speaking areas).

Au cours des annees 1950 en Tunisie, la mise en place d'un embryon d'universite qui vient coiffer le systeme educatif instaure par la direction de l'Instruction publique depuis le debut du protectorat, coincide avec une effervescence nationaliste ou la population etudiante joue un role de premier plan. La jeunesse diplomee dont les effectifs croissent regulierement revendique, entre autres, une place a la mesure de l'instruction acquise dans les cursus zaytunien, khaldunien, a l'etranger ou en Tunisie. La bataille politique et ideologique qui se developpe autour de la reconnaissance officielle des diplomes superieurs, illustre la force croissante de ce symbole de reussite dans l'aspiration elitaire des Tunisiens. Avec l'independance, le diplome prend definitivement sa place dans l'organisation juridique de l'enseignement universitaire et son statut de vecteur d'ascension sociale dans le nouvel Etat national.