Historical Memory: Its Role in Revolutions

Building on my ongoing research into the two waves of the Arab Spring, this paper explores how the memory of earlier revolutions influenced patterns of mobilization in 2011 and 2019. My own ethnographic notes and subsequent data collection show an attentiveness by participants to an almost a whole century of mass mobilization, including imagined successes, failure, and emotional relations to those past events. The paper suggests that this kind of historical memory was responsible in part for the emergence of new styles of movements in the recent uprisings, as well as new forms of knowledge and expressive culture that sought to respond to perceived shortcomings of earlier revolutions. The paper argues that the style of remembering past uprisings is also a form of judgment on them, a judgment that is always conditioned by a perspective on the present sociopolitical order.