REGENERATING REVOLUTION: Gender and Generation in the Sahrawi Struggle for Decolonisation by Vivian Solana A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of Anthropology in a Collaborative with the Women and Gender Studies Institute University of Toronto © Copyright by Vivian Solana, 2017 Regenerating Revolution: Gender and Generation in the Sahrawi Struggle for Decolonisation Vivian Solana Department of Anthropology in a Collaborative with the Women and Gender Studies Institute University of Toronto 2017 Abstract This dissertation investigates the forms of female labour that are sustaining and regenerating the political struggle for the decolonization of the Western Sahara. Since 1975, the Sahrawi national liberation movement—known as the POLISARIO Front—has been organizing itself, while in exile, into a form commensurable with the global model of the modern nation-state. In 1991, a UN mediated peace process inserted the Sahrawi struggle into what I describe as a colonial meantime. Women and youth—key targets of the POLISARIO Front’s empowerment policies—often stand for the movement’s revolutionary values as a whole. I argue that centering women’s labour into an account of revolution, nationalism and state-building reveals logics of long duree and models of female empowerment often overshadowed by the more “spectacular” and “heroic” expressions of Sahrawi women’s political action that feature prominently in dominant representations of Sahrawi nationalism. Differing significantly from globalised and modernist valorisations of women’s political agency, the model of female empowerment I highlight is one associated to the nomadic way of life that predates a Sahrawi project of revolutionary nationalism. I speak of a labour of “regeneration” rather than one of “reproduction” to foreground the political ii agency inherent to women’s daily work whilst also attending to intergenerational differences in political habitus. Enquiring into how Sahrawi women reckon with the contradictions produced by the conditions of a colonial meantime, I examine transformations in women’s labour of love, collective remembrance, hospitality, institutional participation, and practices of marriage/reproduction, to trace the inchoate ways in which Sahrawi women are contributing to multiply the possible futures of a revolutionary process initiated more than forty years ago. iii Acknowledgements The collective struggle of the Saharawi people is the most important resource for this dissertation. I am first and foremost indebited to the dozens of Sahrawi families, citizen-refugees and research assistants who have welcomed me in their homes throughout my fieldwork, offering me protection, more kinds of help than I could have anticipated and friendship to this day. Their example has been the main source of inspiration for the pages that follow. I could also not have done this work without my collegues, friends and mentors from the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. Thank you to Prof. Ángeles Ramírez for being the first to suggest that I travelled to the Saharawi Republic in 2009. Thank you to Poet Bahia Awah for providing me with my first lessons in the history of the Sahrawi people and to Prof. Juan Carlos Gimeno and Prof. Juan Ignacio Robles: their commitment to the Sahrawi struggle, their unflinching ethical-academic stance, and their friendship do not cease to inspire my work and beyond. I owe many thanks to my supervisor Andrea Muehlebach for all her guidance and support throughout my doctoral program at the University of Toronto. Prof. Muehlebach has patiently read the earliest and messiest drafts of the chapters that follow and she has consistently provided me with insightful direction and encouragement. My work has also benefited greatly from the priviledge of regularly conversing with and receiving generous comments from Prof. Amira Mittermaier and Prof. Valentina Napolitano. Andrea Muehlebach’s attention to how the best of people’s intentions may fold into unexpected political outcomes, Amira Mittermaier’s search for that which exceeds discourse and Valentina Napolitano’s attention to the uncanny persistence of the past in the present are just some of the ways in which my core committee’s intellectual contributions have marked and inspired my own. I would also like to express my gratitude to Prof. Lila Abu-Lughod and Prof. Jessok Song for serving on my dissertation defense committee and influencing my work theoretically. A very special thanks goes to my dear friends and colleagues at the University of Toronto’s Anthropology department Timothy Mwangeka Makori (AKA “the word magician”), Columba Gonzalez Duarte and Jacob Nerenberg for exchanging their writing with me, asking me the hardest of iv questions, making the best of suggestions, and rubbing some off their brilliance on to these pages. At the University of Toronto’s Anthropology department I have also been fortunate to know many scholars who have helped me along the way and shaped my thinking, including Prof. Alissa Trotz, Prof. Naisargi Dave, Prof. Jannice Body and Prof. Tania Li. I am also indebted to Prof. Michael Lambeck for his comments of my work while leading the department’s Dissertation Writing Workshop and to all the colleagues who regularly formed part of this group between 2013 and 2014. I also thank Sophia Cotrell, Natalia Krencil, Josie Alaimo, Annete Chan and Kristy Bard from the Anthropology Department’s administration for their work and collegiality. The research and the writing of this dissertation have benefited from the financial support of a number of institutions and programs, including the Anthropology Department at the University of Toronto, the Ontario Graduate Scholarship and the Wenner Green Foundation. I would never have endured the challenge of finishing this project without sharing conversation, meals, drinks and regular dance sessions with the wonderful friends I have had the good fortune to make during the course of my doctoral program. Thank you to Asli Zengin, Secil Dagtas, Columba Gonzalez Duarte, Coco Guzmán, Timothy Makori, Jacob Nerenberg, Ozlem Azlan, Hulya Arik, Laura Mandelbaum, Kate Rice, Meghana Rao, Prasad Khanolkar, Alejandra Gonzalez Jimenez, Daniella Jofre, Janne Dingemans, Salvador Altamirano, Edgar Sotter, Ayşegül Koç, Aaron Kappeler, Jaby Mathew, Dylan Gordon, Salma Altassi and Michelle Tung. Last but not least, I thank my mother for her tireless labour reading and editing all the pages that follow, and to my partner, for patiently looking after me on stressfull days. My indebitness to both is boundless. v Table of Contents Abstract ........................................................................................................................... ii Acknowledgements ........................................................................................................ iv List of Figures .............................................................................................................. viii Glossary ........................................................................................................................... x Abbreviations ................................................................................................................ xii Prelude: The Fortieth Anniversary of the POLISARIO Front............................... xiii 1 Introduction ............................................................................................................... 1 1.1 The Temporality of a Sahrawi Revolutionary Nationalism, Heroic Women and the Gendered Publics of History ............................................................................................................. 17 1.2 Centering Female Labour into Dominant Accounts of Nationalism, Revolution and State-Building ..................................................................................................................................... 34 1.2.1 A Genealogy of Sahrawi Women’s Labour and Political Action ........................................ 38 1.2.2 The Final Years of the Spanish Sahara (1960-1975) ........................................................... 46 1.2.3 Building a Female Republic (1976-1991) ........................................................................... 53 1.2.4 The Labour of Regeneration under the Conditions of a Colonial meantime (1991-2015).. 58 1.3 Chapter Outline ....................................................................................................................... 67 1.4 Methodology, Positionality and Ethnographic Refusal ........................................................ 72 2 Halted Narratives .................................................................................................... 81 2.1 Beginnings ................................................................................................................................. 81 2.2 Before the revolution (1940 – 1960 approximately) .............................................................. 88 2.3 The emergence of the POLISARIO Front and exile (1973 – 1976) ..................................... 94 2.4 Building the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic (1975-1991) ............................................ 99 2.5 A Colonial Meantime: No War and No Peace (1991-2013) ................................................ 114 2.6 Conclusion .............................................................................................................................. 119 2.7 Coda .......................................................................................................................................