Aesthetics of Resistance in Western Sahara

Aesthetics of Resistance in Western Sahara

Jennifer M. Murphy and Sidi M. Omar ask how people move from being victims to becoming indignant resisters, and how to describe that shift in a way that does justice to liberation struggles. They draw on Paulo Freire’s critical pedagogy, bell hooks, Aníbal Quijano’s idea of the coloniality of power, the work of Walter Mignolo, Ramón Grosfoguel and María Lugones, and Barbara Christian’s insistence that theory stay rooted in practice. From this they develop the idea of “aesthetic agency”, a practice of freedom that links creativity, perception and the transformation of conflict.

Their case study is the Gdeim Izik protest camp set up near El Aaiún in occupied Western Sahara in October 2010. They describe its scale, an estimated eight thousand tents, and its self-organised committees for food, health, security and negotiation. The camp kept to nonviolence even after a teenager was killed and when it was forcibly cleared, leaving hundreds injured. The authors highlight the move from economic to openly political demands, the choice to stand outside the cities under Moroccan control and the deliberate revival of the nomadic tent, and they stress the central role of young people and women.

They conclude that Gdeim Izik turns Frantz Fanon’s claim that violence is the route to agency for the colonised on its head, showing that nonviolent action can turn victims into active resisters.

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