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Representation of British Muslims and Multiculturalism in Ayub Khan-Din’s East is East

  • Journal of Modern English Drama
  • Abbr : JMBARD
  • 2015, 28(3), pp.53-78
  • Publisher : 한국현대영미드라마학회
  • Research Area : Humanities > English Language and Literature > English Literature > Contemporary English Drama

KIM, YOO 1

1성균관대학교

Accredited

ABSTRACT

Ayub Khan-Din(1961-), a British Pakistani actor and dramatist, began his playwriting career in the racialization of British Muslims in the 1990s, accelerated by the Salman Rushdie affair and the Gulf War. Focusing on generational and cultural conflicts within a mixed-race family in England, East is East(1996) swerves away from the established media representation of British Muslims which has reduced a multifaceted Muslim identity to a single political movement. The play was well received by white liberal critics who claimed that a multicultural vision in Britain of the 1970s was articulated in such a vivid and positive fashion. However, Khan-Din’s representation of Muslims in the play is problematic since it is deeply associated with the text’s tacit approval to the West’s hegemonic status inscribed in liberal multiculturalism. In East is East, the ultimate isolation of George Khan, a Pakistani patriarch, is integral to the reassertion of the highly oppressive, hegemonic multiculturalism, and Ella, George’s wife, completes his alienation, playing as invisible but superior ‘white centre.’ Focusing on the process in which Islamic patriarchal values clash and reconcile with the ‘empowering’ vision of multiculturalism, this paper argues that Khan-Din’s seemingly ‘progressive’ attempt to revise and expand the meaning of ‘Britishness’ is ironically based on the exclusion of Muslim culture and identity.

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