Cultural Identity as an Epistemic Construct: Ali’s The Domestic Crusaders and Akhtar’s The Who & the What

Noureiddin, Haris A. Noureiddin

doi:10.21608/sjam.2023.202406.1945

Cultural Identity as an Epistemic Construct: Ali’s The Domestic Crusaders and Akhtar’s The Who & the What

نوع المستند : المقالة الأصلية

المؤلف

Haris A. Noureiddin Noureiddin

Dept. of English, Faculty of Languages, Aswan University

10.21608/sjam.2023.202406.1945

المستخلص

This research argues that in the two plays, The Domestic Crusaders (2004) by Wajahat Ali and The Who & the What (2014) by Ayad Akhtar, cultural identity is dramatized through the epistemic spatiotemporal values which the colonial subalterns have experienced. As such, the essentialist and postmodernist views about identity, which cannot but see identity as either predetermined or purely arbitrary, are demoted in favor of the experiential foundations of identity. These experiential foundations provide knowledge which influences the construction and the reshaping of identity in an ongoing process. Based on this vision, the identity of the principal Muslim American women characters in the plays under study is dramatized to be constructed epistemically; that is, in relation to the epistemic contexts in which they have grown. This dramatization aims to expose both the fallibility and inadequacy of the pre and post-9/11 anti-Muslim epistemic violence. The two plays feature the Muslim women protagonists as exhibiting varying degrees of cultural and intellectual orientation, which is attributed to the differing epistemic experiences of the concerned protagonists. The argument draws on Satya P. Mohanty’s 1993 lead article “The Epistemic Status of Cultural Identity . . .,” in which the metaphysics of post-positivist realism is applied to the realm of cultural identity formation, providing a mediated approach to experience and knowledge.

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