아야드 악타르의 불명예에 나타난 인종 정체성과 특이성

Ethnic Identity and Singularity in Ayad Akhtar’s Disgraced

Disgraced, the 2013 Pulitzer prize-winning play, dramatizes the Muslim experience in America where religion and belief become matters of race after 9/11. The four New Yorkers who come from diverse racial backgrounds transform the dinner party into an agora, discussing ethnicity, racial politics, and Islamic aesthetics. Disgraced is a contemporary American tragedy in so far that the racism in progressive cultural organizations forces the protagonist to discard his Islamic identity for secularism, causing his subsequent disgrace. Amir realizes the reality that neither the recovery of Muslim identity nor self-deceptive secularism provides a viable choice. This identification of the Muslim American identity leads Amir to the way of self-discovery. This paper argues that today’s ethnicity, in which matters of race should be considered as immaterial values, brings forth new voices for new minority discourses. Examining how Americans and Muslims are integrated in the era of post-racism, it examines the 21st-century imagination of ethnic singularity.