The Revolution Will Not Be Choreographed: Synchronizing Speech and Movement during the 2019 Algerian Uprising

Dr. Stephanie Love (Pitt Anthropology)

In this talk, I examine the poetics and politics of synchronized speech and movement during Algeria’s 2019 uprising (known as the Hirak, or “the movement”). Participants in mass political movements like the Hirak pay attention to the shape that otherwise individual bodies take together on the street, using language for this coordination. How people make their bodily movements and speech appear synchronized can be understood as a form of vernacular choreography. During the Hirak, this vernacular choreography was shaped by the ideology of “leaderless revolution,” the notion that “the people” spontaneously erupted to express an authentic and singular desire for freedom using a unanimous voice. I analyze a central metapragmatic paradox of the Algerian movement: How did protestors create the effect of synchronized choreography but without choreographers (i.e., leaders)? I show that the imaginary of choreography without choreographers mitigated long-standing struggles over what politics should look like in postcolonial Algeria, grounded in debates over the radical possibilities of consensus (i.e., unanimous voicing) and the failures of representation (i.e., speaking for others) since independence in 1962.