MIDDLE EASTERN AMERICAN DRAMA: NEW DEVELOPMENTS, COUNTER ARGUMNETS
Project no. 959 · Status: Kapanmış · 2017
Summary
his BAP-funded research project (17-EDB-00 has aimed to study Middle Eastern Drama, which has gained an unprecedented popularity and visibility following 9/11 events. This project has first and foremost aimed to define What Middle Eastern drama is. To do this, works by first, second or third generation playwrights who self-identify as Arab, and/or Arab/Muslim have been analyzed. It has been acknowledged that Arab American Drama is a sub-category of Middle Eastern Drama and that Arab American playwrights represent a different political stance in their plays due to their vulnerable and fragile positions in the American society. The plays studied in this volume represent Middle Eastern American dramatic productions which acquired an unprecedented visibility and recognition with the 9/11 events. Coming from different religious and cultural backgrounds, these self-identified Arab American playwrights have preferred to portray politicized Arab American identities in their plays. While doing this, they have created Arab American identities as subjects with agency that are missing from dominant representations of Arab American laden with hatred and fear in the American political and cultural discourses. They have tackled not only inter-cultural but also intra-cultural, and inter-generational tensions emanating largely emanating from the communal concerns about the implementation or abandonment of gender roles, religious observances and traditions. Keywords: Middle Eastern American Drama, Arab American Drama, Transnationalism, home, belonging, identity, Islamophobia