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@article{199738,
        author = {Mohammad Abed Hussein and N. Solomon Benny},
        title = {Reconstructing Arab Muslim Identity in Contemporary American Drama: A Postcolonial, Trauma, and Performance Analysis in the Plays of Yussef El Guindi, Heather Raffo, Rajiv Joseph, Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen},
        journal = {International Journal of Innovative Research in Technology},
        year = {2026},
        volume = {12},
        number = {11},
        pages = {14843-14856},
        issn = {2349-6002},
        url = {https://ijirt.org/article?manuscript=199738},
        abstract = {The existence of Orientalist and securitized tropes, that present Arab Muslim subjects as types of civilizational menace, or other cultural otherness, has been validated over time in scholarship on the Arab Muslim representation in Western cultural production (Said, 1978; Alsultany, 2012; Shaheen, 2009). Although these studies have been greatly applied to film, television, and news media, the American theatre in modern times has been relatively under-theorized as a place of representational contestation. To fill this gap, the current paper develops a comparative study of the chosen plays by Yussef El Guindi, Heather Raffo, Rajiv Joseph, Jessica Blank, and Erik Jensen. The article builds upon postcolonial theory (Said, 1978; Bhabha, 1994), trauma theory (Caruth, 1996; LaCapra, 2001), and performance theory (Butler, 2004; Fischer-Lichte, 2008) by stating that American drama today serves as a counter-discursive space whereby the Arab Muslim identities are being re-articulated using testimonial voice, performative embodiment, and narrative fragmentation. Instead of recreating hegemonic geopolitical scripts, the plays enact the ambivalence, hybridity, and ethical spectatorship, which disturb predetermined types of national and religious identity.
This paper contends that a model that cross-plays the postcolonial and performance-based approaches to analysis can be used to analyze Arab Muslim subjectivity in theatre by synthesizing these two perspectives. It places modern American drama no longer as a mimetic reflection of media discourse but as an aesthetic realm of its own, which reforms representation in the body of encounter and dialogic address.},
        keywords = {American Drama, Arab Muslim, Arab Muslim Identity, Counter-Discourse, Cultural Memory, Diaspora, Performance Studies, Postcolonial Theatre, Representation Studies, Trauma, War.},
        month = {April},
        }