The Aesthetics of Ritual: Performing 'Iraqi-Shi'a' Identity in the Diaspora

What kinds of emotional and affective involvements are invoked in the practice of religious and social rituals, whether at the level of everyday informal practices or formal ceremonies? And how do the aesthetics of ritual produce, shape, and channel these performances and emotions into crystallised forms of identity? Through an analysis of the religious and social practices of Iraqi Shi’is in London, this paper explores the nuances between performative, aural, and visual aesthetics, and especially the ways in which notions of self and other are produced and reified or contested through practices of religious ritual. In particular, the paper uses the notion of psychosocial subject-formation and ritual aesthetics to productively explore the sites of transnational linkages and imaginaries around which ideas of “Shi’a” and “Iraqi” subjectivity coalesce, and which ultimately the politics of identity and its intersection in existing power relations. By drawing attention to the embedded nature of inter-diasporic practices, and the ways in which these are embodied in the aesthetics of religious and social performance, I hope to be able to tease out the relationship between individual and community, and especially the production of a specifically “Iraqi-Shi’a” identity that seeks to place itself on the trans- and inter-national map. In this sense, I envisage the sensory and affective facets of religious and social performance to contribute to forms of political identity that make claims to the nature of the Iraqi state and/or nation, and its place in international relations.