Cinema,Cultures and Marker of Muslim Identity

This research topic will be looking at the cultural imperatives of Cinema to trace meanings of Muslim identity in the genre of war motion pictures made in both Hollywood and Bollywood (the popular coinage for Mumbai-based Indian Hindi commercial cinema) and its effects on the construction of ‘Muslim’ identity. War films, as an emerging genre, seek to identify and understand the ‘other’ in the context of terrorism and violence. Implicit within this production are the constructions of self and ‘other’ relationship and the existing social processes that cinema captures and shapes discursively. The assumption of the research rests on the complex role of Cinema that works to shape perception and promulgate the circulation of particular ideas, and promote or alienate certain identities. The 20th Century has altered notions about the histories of ethnicity, gender, sexuality and the nationalities of people. Cinema has played a significant role in this process. Moreover, through its emphasis on representing, cinema offers to shape our understanding of the contemporary world and what it is like to be, or what we mean by ‘a Muslim’ in the East and the West. In the last two decades, ‘war history’ has infiltrated mainstream cinema from the East (Bollywood) and the West (Hollywood). This research hopes to analyze war films produced in the past from Hollywood and Bollywood film industries to see how they raise concerns about Muslim identity traced through the contemporary crisis of terrorism at the global level and ethnic clashes at the local level.

First Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Nadja-Christina Schneider

Second Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Birgit Krawietz