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Chris Rominger: Mukhtar al-Ayari, Josephine Planter, and Alternative Voices in Tunisia, 1912-1925

October 15th
12:30pm – 2:00 pm
Room 5307
The Graduate Center, CUNY

From the outbreak of the First World War until about 1925, how did an elite, moderate Tunisian reform movement evolve into a diverse field of new, radical, competing visions for Tunisia’s future? Exploratory research on the life and writings of Mukhtar al-Ayari, a veteran and communist activist, and of Josephine Planter, an Austrian-American Pentecostal missionary in Tunis, suggests that the war experience stretched the limits of both the practice of French colonial rule, on the one hand, and of Tunisian expectations for the future, on the other. The result was the opening up of a brief yet momentous window of opportunity, one which carved out spaces for the emergence of alternative voices which did not always intersect with the nationalism of Tunisia’s elite.

Chris Rominger graduated from Middlebury College before serving as Associate Director of the Arab American Association of New York from 2008 to 2011. Rominger then joined the CUNY Graduate Center’s doctoral program in History, where he is a student fellow on the Committee for the Study of Religion and the Advanced Research Collaborative. Rominger studies early 20th century reformist and anti-colonial movements in the Middle East and North Africa. In particular, his research focuses on the dislocations experienced by Tunisian veterans, families, dissidents and activists during the First World War and its aftermath.