Hasan Özgür Top, Mandus Ridefelt & Assem Hendawi: Caliphate Pop

In 2017, the recent territorial instance of ‘The Caliphate’ under the rule of the Islamic State came to an end with the recapture of Mosul and Raqqa. But what about the technopolitical web in which the hyperkinetic and mythologically charged propaganda of the Islamic State proliferated through sound, vision and audiovisuality? Caliphate Pop does not attempt to describe an anomaly of radicalization: “How could these persons do it?” While the IS propaganda apparatus was equally surprising and disturbing, Caliphate Pop departs from the opposite premise that a political entity like the Islamic State and its operative aesthetic is both possible and probable. Through a range of historical accounts, audio-visual analyses and theoretical speculation, Caliphate Pop approaches the moment where the grafting of mythologies onto the volatile technopolitical web of contemporary digital pop cultures take on a genocidal manifestation.