Studi Magrebini. North African Studies.

Special Issue: Subalterns and the Middle East: Challenges, Histories, Historiagraphies, edited by Laura Guazzone and Rossana Tufaro

Studi Magrebini. North African Studies is a peer-reviewed international scholarly journal, which has been published since 1966. The areas of interest of the magazine range from history, religion, law, and literatures to epigraphy, philosophy, philology, art, archaeology, and economics. It welcomes synchronic and diachronic perspectives, beginning from the historical origin of North Africa to the present day.
This special issue examines the renewed scholarly engagement with subaltern groups in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA/SWANA) in the wake of the Arab Uprisings. The uprisings exposed the centrality of non-elite actors—such as the urban poor, informal workers, marginalized youth, and gendered and queer subjectivities—as agents of political and social transformation, challenging longstanding elite-centered and (neo)orientalist paradigms in the study of the region. The special issue builds on earlier interventions in subaltern and social history, as well as on conceptual frameworks such as Asef Bayat’s “non-movements,” and Antonio Gramsci’s relational understanding of subalternity. The five articles included here investigate practices of resistance, negotiation, and political mobilization among Gulf pearl divers, South Lebanese tobacco growers, Moroccan women activists, Palestinian actors during the First Intifada, and contemporary forms of female labor.