Description
In 1985, Mustafa Akkad’s film ‘The Lion of the Desert’, which portrays the anti-colonial struggle of the 70-year-old Omar Mukhtar against Mussolini's colonial rule, was screened at the Regal Cinema in the contested region of Jammu and Kashmir. The screening triggered spontaneous protests against Sheikh Abdullah and the National Conference, a party central to Kashmir's political landscape since 1931. The movie became an essential site for collective remembrance, connecting audiences to subdued political aspirations. The paper argues that cinema creates spaces to express repressed political aspirations. Hence, it seeks to study the role of collective memory in animating the politics of ‘Aazadi’ in the disputed state of Jammu and Kashmir. Positioned at the intersection of memory politics and the aesthetic turn in International Relations (IR), the paper argues that Cinema or visual representations shape popular imaginaries and how we act in the world; in essence, visuality produces and shapes politics. The study further raises epistemological questions concerning the role of art in understanding political events (Blieker, 2006) and also attempts to foreground the activist potential of cinema.
Drawing on interviews with people who had watched the movie in the theatre, we argue that art can illustrate the affective politics of estrangement. The article aims to show what movies can do by providing an innovative method for creating new sites and senses of international politics (Callahan, 2015). In line with the aesthetic turn in IR, the paper expands our understanding of the range of sites, locations, and directions where politics could be investigated, where politics could be contested, and where forms of violence and oppression could be resisted (Steele, 2017, p. 209).
