Between rap and jihad: spectacular subcutlures, terrorism and visuality

ABSTRACT

This article underlines the importance of terrorist jihadist online communication. The visual expressions of sociocultural identity are a trademark of jihadist terrorist groups. This paper also shows that subcultural perspective constitutes a privileged point of view for the analysis of the phenomenon of Western-born jihadist terrorism. In scientific literature there is a lack of empirical research on the visual dimension of jihadist terrorism in a subcultural perspective. In this perspective, the article analyses the subcultural identity of a Western-born jihadist terrorist, the former rapper Deso Dogg, also known as Abu-Maleeq. This paper proposes an original analysis of terrorist group membership, analysing through visual sociology the YouTube videos of Deso Dogg – Abu-Maleeq. The visual jihadist representation is based on the repetition of semantic elements. This result confirms the importance of the semantic coherence of communication, namely the Hebdigian homology. Furthermore, terrorist communication assigns new meanings to traditional cultural elements. This result confirms the relevance of the subcultural practice of bricolage. In conclusion, the article allows an original perspective for the study of terrorist communication and underlines the importance of Hebdigian perspective for the understanding of what processes turned troubled Western youth into terrorists.

KEYWORDS:

• Sociology
• terrorism
• subculture
• visual sociology
• methodology
• sociological theory

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributor

Uliano Conti Ph.D. is Research Fellow at University of Perugia, Department of Philosophy, Social Sciences and Education. He was visiting researcher at Arizona State University (U.S.A.) and Loughborough University (U.K.). He has been working for years with visual sociology. His research topics are methodology, visual sociology and subcultural theory. He teaches Social Research Methodology at the Bachelor’s Degree program in Sciences for Investigation and Security and Method and Techniques of Social Inquiry at the Master’s Degree program in Management of Social Risks at the University of Perugia.

Notes

1. For Baba Faye (2011) the terms children of immigration include categories as children rejoined to family, children from migrant couples, children from mixed couple.

2. Deso Dogg, whose original name was Denis Cuspert, was a German rapper. He became a terrorist and a nasheed music singer. He joined ISIS in Syria.

3. Human being uses spoken language in many ways. Moreover, human being creates and interprets meanings through multiple semantic activities, for example, through glances, posture and body movements.