Asef Bayat, 2010. Life As Politics: How Ordinary People Change the Middle East, Standford Univ. press.
Preface
This book is about the "art of presence," the story of agency in times of constraints. It is about "agency" and "change" in the Muslim Middle East, the societies in which religion seems to occupy a prominent position. It discusses "the diverse ways in which the ordinary people, the subaltern - the urban dispossessed, Muslim women, the globalizing youth, and other urban grass roots - strive to affect the contours of change in their societies, by refusing to exit from the social and political stage controlled by authoritarian states, moral authority, and neoliberal economies, discovering and generating new spaces within which they can voice their dissent and assert their presence of bettering their lives." (ix, 2010)
Albayat argues that the vehicles by which ordinary people change their societies are not simply audible mass protests or revolutions, even though they represent an aspect of popular mobilization; rather, - and this is Albayat's contribution, people resort to "nonmovements" (ix, 2010). Nonmovements are the collective endeavors of millions of noncollective actors, carried out in the main squares, back streets, courthouses, or communities (ix, 2010).
The book is divided into three uneven parts of 13 chapters.
Introduction
Preface
This book is about the "art of presence," the story of agency in times of constraints. It is about "agency" and "change" in the Muslim Middle East, the societies in which religion seems to occupy a prominent position. It discusses "the diverse ways in which the ordinary people, the subaltern - the urban dispossessed, Muslim women, the globalizing youth, and other urban grass roots - strive to affect the contours of change in their societies, by refusing to exit from the social and political stage controlled by authoritarian states, moral authority, and neoliberal economies, discovering and generating new spaces within which they can voice their dissent and assert their presence of bettering their lives." (ix, 2010)
Albayat argues that the vehicles by which ordinary people change their societies are not simply audible mass protests or revolutions, even though they represent an aspect of popular mobilization; rather, - and this is Albayat's contribution, people resort to "nonmovements" (ix, 2010). Nonmovements are the collective endeavors of millions of noncollective actors, carried out in the main squares, back streets, courthouses, or communities (ix, 2010).
The book is divided into three uneven parts of 13 chapters.
Introduction
- The Art of Presence
- Transforming the Arab Middle East: Dissecting a Manifesto
- The Quiet Encroachment of the Ordinary
- The Poor and the Perpetual Pursuit of Life Chances
- Feminism of Everyday Life
- Reclaiming Youthfulness
- The Politics of Fun
- A Street Named "Revolution:
- Does Radical Islam Have an Urban Ecology?
- Everyday Cosmopolitanism
- The "Arab Street"
- Is there a Future for Islamic Revolutions?
- No Silence, No Violence: Post-Islamist Trajectory
