This talk explores the contours of civilian life in post-Gaddafi Libya through a focus on militia-built sonic environments and encounters. Research on Libyan politics in the period since the 2011 revolution has been largely policy-oriented, advancing the language of state failure and chaos in efforts to impel particular action by global and regional powers. Leila’s current research project intervenes by centering the politics of daily life in post-2011 Libya and highlighting the ways that power relations have manifested through grounded, embodied interactions. In particular, militias have used sound practices – from loudspeaker announcements to music concerts and from discourses about accent to conversations at checkpoints – to substantiate political authority during the years after 2011. These sound practices, in turn, have formed dispersed sites of political contestation between civilians and members of armed groups.

Speaker 
Leila Tayeb, Humanities Research Fellow, NYUAD

Moderated by
Deborah Kapchan, Professor of Performance Studies, NYU