(De)constructing national modernity: Nation branding and the staging of the Islamic State

Abstract

The Islamic State is not a branded nation; it is the nation as a brand. In a region decimated by transnational violence, the military intervention of the 2003 Iraq War and the on-going destabilisation of Syria, the Islamic State extends beyond its atrocities and into nation branding and the realignments entailed by the advent of late modernity. In this talk, we consider the enactment and attempted legitimisation of the Islamic State by scrutinising its discursive and semiotic staging in the experiential, mediatised spaces of its official publication, Dabiq. First, we analyse the rhetoric of its constitutive utterances and its enregisterment (cf. Agha 2003, 2007) of liturgical language. Then we examine how symbolic national involvement (Shatz and Lavine 2007) is recognised and performed in the Islamic State flag. Following its dissemination and construction into the Islamic State's own use of tourism-oriented discourse, we discuss how its constitutive utterances and symbolic national involvement are enacted as a tourist destination in the conditions of 'banal globalisation' (Thurlow and Jaworski 2010). Overall, we conclude that an analysis of the constitutive utterances of the Islamic State also questions the conception of national modernity and the legitimacy of state-sanctioned violence.