Social Currents in North Africa
This introductory chapter offers a critical reassessment of the disciplinary contours have become all the more desirable in light of the momentous and unforeseen sociopolitical upheavals, known as the Arab uprisings, which started in Tunisia in December 2010. The “territory-crossing” reach and substantive implications of the uprisings have compelled North Africanists to review some of the paradigmatic and procedural assumptions in their field of studies, and to don fresh conceptual and methodological lenses when reading Arab societies more broadly. To this end, the chapter addresses the following questions: have the Arab uprisings exposed heretofore underestimated regional commonalities for historians and social scientists to explain? And can post-uprising research promote greater analytic rigor and disciplinary synergies in North African studies, to the benefit of more varied transregional and comparative perspectives on national developments?