Society for Cultural Anthropology

Oral Presentation Session

Islamophobia, or Islam as Culture Degree Zero

Presenter(s)

• MM

  Mahmut Mutman

  University of Tampere

The emergence of a new, “unrestrained and immediate” image of Islam in Western media in the late 1970s and early 1980s should be seen a precursor of today’s Islamophobia. Emphasizing that what is at stake here is not an ideology in the sense of a doctrine, I argue that Islamophobia must be understood as a new unfolding of Western worlding of the world. Following Franz Fanon’s comparative analysis of “Negrophobia” and anti-Semitisim, I demonstrate that it is a new discursive-affective formation. I then go through the constitutive features of Islamophobic racism and underscore its strong affective dimension, which is inextricable from the concept of terrorism and the new assemblage of security.