"Aesthetics and Politics of Contemporary Shiite Images: Passion-Play in the Transnational Circuitry" by Mazyar Lotfalian (Humanities Center, UC-Santa Cruz)

Abstract

After the invasion of Iraq, the distribution of the sensible (the politics of making people and things visible) in the West, has shifted to include more of the Shi’ite iconography and passion plays. This is a remarkable shift and it demonstrates how aesthetics has entered the world of politics. This paper explores this contemporary shift by focusing on how the Shi’ite passion play of Karbala, known in its theatrical form as Ta’ziyeh, enters into the realm of phantasmagoria and the transnational circuits. This locally produced form of art has become the subject of mediatization in recent years. Through various productions such as different mis-en-scene, particular use of technology, and shift-in-audience, I discuss the trajectory of this change into the phantasmagoria of the transnational circuits and the emergence of new Shi’ite Karbala paradigm.

About the Author

Mazyar Lotfalian (PhD, Anthropology, Rice University) is currently a resident scholar at the Center for Cultural Studies at UC Santa Cruz. He is working on a book on the transnational circulation of visual culture (cinema, multimedia art, performance, and photography) and its appropriation of Islamic themes based on ethnographic research conducted in New York City, Berlin, Beirut, and Tehran. He is also interested in studies of science and technology in non-Western settings and the role the religion, a topic he addressed in his book, Islam, Technoscientific Identities, and Culture of Curiosity (2004, UPA). For this work he conducted multi-sited ethnographic research of Islamic movements in Malaysia, Turkey, Iran, and the US. He has taught courses on Islam, cinema, media, and science studies at Yale, and held post-doctoral fellowship positions at the Center for Religion and Media at NYU, and at Harvard University’s Middle East Center.

Contact and Further Links

Contact Information:
email: mazyar2@ucsc.edu or mazyar@alum.berkeley.edu