Draft paper on Islamophobia as lay ideology of US-led empire

In this draft academic paper, Islamophobia is analyzed as a “lay ideology” that offers an everyday “common sense” explanatory framework for making sense of mediated crisis events (such as terrorist attacks) in ways that disavow those events’ political meanings (rooted in empire, racism, and resistance) and instead explain them as products of a reified “Muslimness.” Thus Islamophobia involves an ideological displacement of political antagonisms onto the plane of culture, where they can be explained in terms of the fixed nature of the “Other.” This maneuver is also an act of projection in the psychoanalytic sense: the racist and imperialist violence upon which US-led capitalism depends cannot be acknowledged in liberal society so it is transferred onto the personality of the Muslim and seen as emanating from “outside” the social order. Imperial violence is then only ever a proportionate response to the inherently aggressive and threatening nature of the fanatical Muslim enemy. In these ways, a Western self-image of innocence and beneficence can be maintained by screening out resistance to the US-led system of global capitalism. On this view, Islamophobia is an instance of a general pattern of racisms serving as imperial ideologies in the modern era. The article contests accounts of Islamophobia that focus only on individual attitudes of prejudice and hatred and instead analyzes Islamophobia as a structural feature of capitalism in the twenty-first century that is intertwined with systems of state surveillance and is able to adapt itself ideologically to a wide variety of local settings.

The paper can be downloaded here.

A German translation of the paper is available here.

3 thoughts on “Draft paper on Islamophobia as lay ideology of US-led empire

  1. Your list of problems of Islam is correct, Terror, Suppression, Infiltration, Extremism, Sexual dysfunction. But then blaming US imperial ambition may be correct but a coherent case is not made when you draw in Israel Russia India Sikhs who all have the same probkem of terror. What you choose to ignore are the basic texts of the religion Koran Hadith Sunna, all combine to lay out how to practice Islam. It boils down to: a good Muslim is one who does not follow the texts to the letter, an extremist does. I a child of British racisim and colonialism, of color

    • We don’t need to blame US! Just open your eyes to what’s going on in the world because of US, UK and so called democracies whi invade other sovereignities, create, fund and train terror groups, the military interventions and coup d’etats, the corrupt elite, the spread of new diseases such as Cancer and Ebola to kill millions of people rather than provide for them, the killing of others all o er the world just to get their hands on their oil and resources….I could go on stating real facts, but I’stop here yet these so called demo recipes are telling us that they fight for our freedom, for our human rights, for our equality and prosperity! Really???

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