Beyond Heroes and Villains: punishment, performance and ‘post-conflict’ masculinities in British Islamist Extremism | Zia Ali
Tomorrow (17th March) Zia Ali will be presenting a paper entitled “Beyond Heroes and Villains: punishment, performance and ‘post-conflict’ masculinities in British Islamist Extremism” which is aimed at exploring the grounds for his doctoral project. As (almost) always, we will meet at 13.00 at room 202, Pavilion Parade. Zia has kindly written an abstract which is included below. Everyone welcome!
“This paper will outline the framework for a practical case study that will investigate the origins, locations and historical contexts underlying the call to violence and extremism in young Muslim men (16-21). The research will navigate the unchartered territories between the embodied and disembodied memories of perpetrators and the cultural corporeality of their collectives. How, when and why does the call to extremism originate? How can dimensions of memory – or ‘postmemory’ – be revisited, re-imagined and represented to transform legacies of violence? This enquiry is predicated on the idea that Islamist extremism not only involves questions of justice and punishment within a broader ideological context, but also conjunctions with heroic and mythical constructions of masculinity. Drawing from the work of young men’s mentoring charity, ‘A Band of Brothers,’ the case study will utilise tools of mythodrama, storytelling and somatic movement to investigate the transformative capacity of liminal spaces for performative testimonies of violence to be ‘witnessed’ and critically examined. Can such liminal spaces offer possibilities of building ‘post-conflict territories and masculinities, both psychologically and culturally. The paper will also refer to specific disciplines and areas of critical theory – such as postcolonial theory, traumatology, performance studies and dynamical systems theory – that are being explored at this early stage of the research as potential theoretical lenses for the case study.”