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Islamic Semiotics in Turkish Black Metal

Referent Douglas Mattson

Veranstaltungsdaten

Gastvortrag von Douglas Mattsson zum Thema:

“Islamic Semiotics in Turkish Black Metal”

The most extreme subgenre of metal, black metal, is famous for its anti-Christian and Satanic aesthetics. Violent incidents connected to the Norwegian black metal scene in the early 1990s, such as Church-burnings, murders, and arsons, would make the genre notorious and solidify the perception that its fans and musicians reject religion. However, since black metal is born out of a Christian cultural context, to utilize Islamic semiotics in an anti-Islamic way, have, until now, been a rare phenomenon. A few years ago, some black metal bands in Istanbul started to utilize anti-Islamic imagery in their cultural production. Based on an extensive fieldwork, coupled with lyrical and visual analysis, this talk explores this new relationship between Islam and black metal in Turkey. It seeks to answer the questions of why these expressions occur now, as well as which meanings are ascribed to them by black metal fans and musicians in Turkey.

Biograpical Note:

Douglas Mattsson is a PhD candidate at the Department of Religious Studies at Södertörn University in Stockholm, Sweden. He has held senior scholarships from the Swedish Research Institute in Istanbul and the German Orient Institute in Istanbul for his research on the Turkish black metal scene. His most recent publications include the co-authored chapter ‘The Enemy Within: Conceptualizing Turkish Metalheads as the Ideological “Other”’ in the forthcoming anthology Living Metal (Intellect Press, 2021) as well as ‘I am Satan! black metal, Islam, and blasphemy in Turkey and Saudi Arabia’ (Contemporary Islam, 2018). He is currently working on his dissertation, which is an ethnographic study of the Turkish black metal scene.

https://sh.academia.edu/DouglasMattsson

Webkonferenz: https://webconf.hrz.uni-marburg.de/b/pie-chg-wl4-0v5