Narrating Muslims In Post-9/11 America: On Ayad Akhtar’s Homeland Elegies

Ayad Akhtar's 2020 novel Homeland Elegies explores the problematic fissures in the assumed homogeneous contours of US nationality and national belonging in the years following 9/11. In this story, a Pakistani-American father and son navigate a radicalised America with rising notions of parochial nationalism and xenophobic paranoia. Many Americans see an alien dogma in Islam espousing oppression and irrationality; Homeland Elegies interrogates their monolithic patriotism that denies space to the ethnoreligious other. Akhtar ultimately attempts to locate a space that could transcend the contradictory and divisive ideological rhetorics around what it means to be an American. He further traces the rise of Donald Trump and his particular version of alt-white, right-wing Republicanism - a profoundly racist, anti-immigrant ideology that has resonated with the US mainstream over the last decade.