Performing Anti-Muslim Racism; Or, Muslim Self-Fashioning in Ayad Akhtar’s Plays

Ayad Akhtar claimed in an interview after a performance of his Pulitzer-winning play Disgraced that the play was about the ways Muslims “are still beholden on an ontological level to the ways in which the West is seeing us.” The point is for Muslims to free themselves from those networks of symbolic identification by reclaiming their voices and telling their own stories. The claim, then, is that the performance of Muslimness that Akhtar is initiating on the American stage with his critically acclaimed plays allows Muslims to escape the rules and demands of the hegemonic play of identities. How, then, does one redefine Muslimness while performing it? Situated in this context, this paper examines the narrative possibilities and possible narratives that are available to Muslim characters on the American stage. This article will read two of Akhtar’s plays, Disgraced (2013) and The Who & The What (2014), through the lens of this purported claim of ontological reconstruction. Following Akhtar’s admission that the latter was inspired by William Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew, I will extend the same principle of adaptability to read the former as a contemporary retelling of Othello. As a critique pivoted on the triple axes of class, gender, and form, this article will argue that by deploying the same ideological positions and stereotypical narratemes that legitimize anti-Muslim racism in America in the larger project of the US Empire, Akhtar leaves his self-endowed task of ontological reconstruction both politically and ethically wanting.