Re–turning Home: Transnational Movements and the Transformation of Landscape and Culture in the Marginal Communities of Tunis

Abstract

Global capitalism reworks local experience and landscapes in its own image, but forms and practices of global capitalism are also rooted in and transformed by local social and spatial structures. This paper discusses the simultaneity of both aspects through an examination of changing cultural practices of Tunisian workers residing in marginal urban neighborhoods, and shows how these changes are shaped by the workers' transnational experiences both as migrants abroad and in transnational enterprises at home. One response to such local experiences and incorporations of the non‐local is political Islam, a movement that combines accommodation and resistance to new cultural forms, and whose appeal and implications stretch beyond national boundaries.