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" American Muslim Humor, Secular Aesthetics, and the Politics of Recognition "
Choudhury, Samah Selina
Hammer, Juliane
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Latin Dissertation
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English
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| Record Number
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1057154
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| Doc. No
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TL56271
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| Main Entry
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Choudhury, Samah Selina
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| Title & Author
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American Muslim Humor, Secular Aesthetics, and the Politics of Recognition\ Choudhury, Samah SelinaHammer, Juliane
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| College
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The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
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| Date
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2020
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| Degree
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Ph.D.
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2020
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| Note
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319 p.
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| Abstract
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This dissertation focuses on the cultural productions of humor by South Asian Muslim men and the ways in which “Islam” is self-constructed and articulated through comedic performance in a contemporary U.S. context. I argue that humor is a mode of secular discourse, in which the ability to laugh at oneself has been disciplined into a prized personality trait of the ideal subject within secular social schemas. In such a humor regime, the gendered and racialized Muslim body becomes a signifier of communal belonging, exclusion, and religious difference. Through a critical analysis of films, television shows, and standup comedy routines by the comedians Aziz Ansari, Kumail Nanjiani, and Hasan Minhaj, I chart the discursive goalposts that demarcate when humor becomes explicitly marked and/or recognized as Muslim, and when these comedians themselves were named and name themselves as such. Under a progressive consensus of recognition, these men step into their Muslim identities through the language and hostile implications of racialization. They cultivate a Right Muslim self that upholds secular ideals like multiculturalism by taming bodily comportments that may otherwise affiliate with Islam outside the legible boundaries of racialized difference. The humor that these men stage subverts categorical assumptions about Muslim sedition and violence while also offering a performance of representative resistance to counter the hegemonic order that reads largely as white. This performance does not hold to account the disciplinary demands of secularity and the larger social discourses that have naturalized their difference in the first place.
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Gender studies
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Islamic studies
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Religion
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South Asian studies
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Hammer, Juliane
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The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
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