Nothing But a Name
Abstract
This practice-led thesis develops a framework I call Counter-Surveillance Cinema — a mode of filmmaking that inverts the surveillance gaze trained on Muslim communities to instead witness their interiority, labor, and survival. The accompanying film, Without a Halt, confines its narrative to the interior of a rideshare car, where Ali, a South Asian Muslim driver working under a borrowed identity, navigates one escalating encounter with a passenger. The car functions not as a vehicle of mobility but as a chronotope of entrapment — a space where economic precarity, algorithmic surveillance, and post-9/11 Islamophobia converge. Drawing on Hamid Naficy's theory of accented cinema, Junaid Rana's analysis of racialized labor migration, and Erving Goffman's framework of impression management, the thesis argues that dominant cinema has systematically reduced Muslim subjects to legible threats — erasing their interiority, their labor, and their quiet dignities. Counter-Surveillance Cinema refuses that reduction. It deploys the camera to witness what surveillance systems obscure: the faith, the fatigue, the performance, and the cost of surviving on the margins. What does survival cost when visibility itself becomes a liability? This thesis answers that question not in argument, but in form.
