Lively Scenes of Love and Combat : il teatro Arab e Muslim-American nel ventunesimo secolo

The essay explores of how Arab-American and Arab-Muslim playwrights have reacted to the growth of Islamophobia, surveillance and discrimination within the US after 9/11. It also explores the pluralities of cultural, religious and political fractures that have characterized both the national and the international arena in the last two decades. Together with the criticism to the “state of Exception” in the work of playwrights like Youssef El Guindi and Rania Khalil, Arab-American and Muslim-American theatre engages with the Us/Them dichotomy Islamophobia relies on, and deconstructs this binary opposition by showing how, as shown in Betty Shamieh’s Roar, Jamil Khoury’s Precious Stones and in particular in Ayad Akhtar’s Disgraced, cultural preconceptions and distorted representations form a blurred continuum in the history of minority cultures