“The Question Remains… Of Your Place”: Challenging Reductive Identities in Ayad Akhtar’sDisgraced”

Ayad Akhtar’s play Disgraced asks its audience to examine the “place” of minorities in the United States. This essay argues that the play deliberately invokes certain stereotypes about Islam and Muslim men in order to interrogate essentialized notions of identity. Akhtar persuasively demonstrates how Amir simultaneously believes his identity to be a performance he can script, but also an inheritance and imposition over which he has little control. Amir’s reliance upon essentializations about others, however, underscores the irony that he cannot escape from participating in the very system he tries to subvert. Disgraced demands that viewers confront their own worldviews and possible prejudices about Islam and Muslim men, race and racial identity, and asks whether we can fashion our own identities or whether our identities are inextricably linked to race, religion, or nation-state.