Peripheral Visions: Publics, Power and Performance in Yemen, by Lisa Wedeen

Extract

This is a superb book. Lisa Wedeen brings a complex theory of interpretation to the study of nation building in Yemen. She explores the power of performances that penetrate cultural life as they work upon bodily dispositions and valences. Peripheral Visions has several high points, including a critique of secular theories that separate national imaginaries from Islamic practices of piety; a wonderful exploration of “qat chews”—a custom through which democratic dispositions and a national imaginary are promoted through semipublic discourses; an account of how the weakness of the state can enlarge the imagination of the nation; and an engagement with the effects of global neoliberalism on discursive practices in Yemen. Each level and mode is interwoven with the others. So we gain a complex understanding of politics that is irreducible to the kind of study organized around fixed categories of analysis and “variables” that do not interpenetrate.