The concentrationary Gothic: terror and the dynamism of Islamophobia in 21st Century Britain

This thesis challenges dominant conceptions of terror within the discursive formation of the ‘war on terror’ which positions Muslims as its agent by advancing a conceptual framework for explicating the multiple ways in which Muslims are subjected to terror which I term the
‘Concentrationary Gothic.’ This framework examines how the Gothic technology that produces Muslims as ‘monstrous’ through their association with a barbaric and pre-modern subjectivity, is connected to concentrationary terrors that comprise the governmental strategies used to manage the Muslim ‘threat’ that are framed by the state of exception. I focus on how terror operates through surveillance practices that affect all social relations including state, intergroup, internal, and self-surveillance levels. Each chapter examines an aspect of surveillance and its connection to a particular visual technology that subjects Muslims to a form of misreading which works to perpetuate the conditions of the Concentrationary Gothic through which terror is experienced by them. In response to these visual technologies, I propose an alternative visual schema which I call the ‘inter-bodily-relational’ (IBR). The IBR approaches subjects as relational, bodily, affective, spatial, and whose experiences are mediated by voice. These aspects are examined alongside surveillance practices to explicate how terror structures the conditions of
their enactment. By examining how the Concentrationary Gothic operates through these aspects, the IBR forces a re-consideration of the ways in which terror is dynamised in the current moment for Muslims and its affect on their lived experiences. The IBR informs the project’s research methods which develops a social map alongside in-depth qualitative interviews conducted with 26 Muslims in Leeds and Bradford in 2010-11. The method connects to the thesis objective of developing alternative
ways of thinking about how terror is dynamised, moving across participants’ social words, and its impact on the identities which participants enact and are enacted by in contemporary Britain.