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Hospitality's Prowess: Performing Sahrāwī Sovereignty in Refugee Camps
Author(s) -
Solana Vivian
Publication year - 2019
Publication title -
polar: political and legal anthropology review
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.529
H-Index - 27
eISSN - 1555-2934
pISSN - 1081-6976
DOI - 10.1111/plar.12312
Subject(s) - hospitality , refugee , articulation (sociology) , sovereignty , rhetorical question , politics , power (physics) , political science , democracy , sociology , nationalism , gender studies , tourism , media studies , law , art , physics , literature , quantum mechanics
The Sahrāwī movement for national liberation—known as the Polisario Front—has been organizing into the Sahrāwī Arab Democratic Republic in refugee camps since 1976. This article describes rhetorical and administrative strategies that muster the labor of hospitality carried out in Sahrāwī households to advance the legitimacy of the Polisario Front. The khayma (tent, household, or family), a customary domain of female power and symbol of hospitality among the Sahrāwī (and beyond), bears a metonymic relationship with the project of a Sahrāwī revolutionary nationalism. Examining how hospitality serves as a nexus of articulation between different orders of the political, it argues that practices of hospitality among Sahrāwī refugees constitute the expression of a form of popular sovereignty and revolutionary practice.