[ecrea] CfP Vision, Visuality and Visual Culture: Islamic Contexts and Publics

*Call for Papers*

*AAA, Nov. 20-24 2013, Chicago*

*Vision, Visuality and Visual Culture: Islamic Contexts and Publics*

* *

This panel recuperates an understanding of visuality beyond Western
histories by ethnographically exploring visual culture as a key site for
thinking out the different trajectories of religion in contemporary Muslim
societies. With Christianity usually posited as a* *“visual” religion and
Islam as an “auditory” one, most scholarly works looking at the
intersections of visuality and religion have done so in a (Western)
Christian context. In keeping with the AAA’s interdisciplinary emphasis
this year, this panel puts into conversation anthropological studies of how
the materiality of different media contributes to religious formations at
particular historical moments with the interest of other scholars of visual
culture in everyday, socially-grounded practices of seeing. We hope that
attending more closely to visual fields in Muslim societies will contribute
theoretically to long-standing disciplinary concerns with ritual,
personhood, performance and the sacred.

What modes of (not) seeing are privileged or denounced within historically
authoritative Islamic frames? How are different notions of visuality
negotiated and/or contested in the age of rapid transnational television
imports and exports? What do jurisprudential and popular debates over the
production of dramatic serials visually depicting Qur’anic prophets tell us
about the politics and ethics of sight? What visual analogies and metaphors
do Islamic preachers and activists draw upon to connect with their imagined
audiences?  What new scopic regimes arise at the interface of new media
technologies and Islamic exhortatory traditions? How is the faculty of
seeing a site of ethical cultivation, affective pleasure or sensory excess?

We invite papers addressing these questions through ethnographies and
analyses of the production, circulation, consumption and framing of the
visual in Muslim societies.  Please submit abstracts of no more than 250
words and CVs to Yasmin Moll ((yasmin.moll /at/ nyu.edu)  <(Yasmin.moll /at/ nyu.edu)>)
and Wazhmah Osman ((wazhmah /at/ gmail.com)) by March 12.

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