Property Documents in Post-Revolution Tunis

This article explores how residents of La Petite Sicile, a low-income neighbourhood of Tunis, developed affective and temporal dispositions to the post-revolutionary state through interactions with property documents at times of eviction risk. The neighbourhood underwent evictions during the Ben Ali dictatorship, threats which rematerialised in the post-revolutionary period, throwing inhabitants into states of unease and discontent towards the political situation. Drawing on two years of ethnographic fieldwork in Tunis (2014–2016), this article traces the affective genealogies of documents produced to testify to residents’ housing rights in La Petite Sicile. In presenting an approach to legal documentation as repositories of political affectivities in the post-revolutionary period, it highlights how the intersection between urban changes, materiality and political/moral affects complicates facile narratives of democratic transition.