In Love’s forthcoming book, Streets of a Million Martyrs: Poetics and Politics in Urban Algeria (under contract with U. Chicago Press), she accompanies ordinary people as they move through their beloved yet deteriorating Oran—Algeria’s second-largest city—navigating a politically charged postcolonial context and shouldering burdens that contradict the freedom and futures for which a “million martyrs” fought and died. By paying close attention to people’s everyday language about the city, Love, shows how city dwellers sustain a revolutionary spirit despite grappling with an all-too-recent history of violence, crumbling infrastructure, and ongoing state efforts to silence their diverse stories. During sixteen months of ethnographic fieldwork in Oran, the ordinary city dwellers Love met revealed to her the world-making potential of what she calls everyday urban poetics. Broadly speaking, everyday urban poetics refers to the creative force of ordinary language, in which city dwellers attune their linguistic forms (placenames, jokes, metaphors, rhymes, moral anecdotes, and strategic code-switches) to urban forms (public spaces, monuments, buildings, cemeteries, the layout of streets, and types of city dwellers) with political potential. These widespread poetic practices, developed in and through everyday life on city streets, created a repository of revolutionary language embedded with aesthetically coded political sentiments. By analyzing radio programs, taxi conversations, feminist book groups, graffiti, and popular songs, Love explores where these everyday urban poetics come from and how remarkable yet ordinary people are compelled to redefine the realm of the possible through their everyday practices of dwelling in, speaking about, and navigating the city as forms of social and political action. Beyond enabling revolutions, Love argues that this poetic mode of being keeps hope alive even in the darkest of times.
Stephanie V. Love received a Ph.D. in linguistic and cultural anthropology from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY) in 2022. Before joining the University of Pittsburgh, she held a postdoctoral fellowship at the Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey.
Sponsor(s): Center for Near Eastern Studies, co-organized with UCLA Anthropology Discourse Lab