Race consciousness, the audacity of equality, and transcultural criticism in Hasan Minhaj’s homecoming king.

Abstract

This article examines the role of the diasporic stand-up comic as a transcultural critic and the comedy set as an act of transcultural criticism of contemporary American culture. I use the framework of transcultural criticism developed by Lewis1 (2002) for the purpose of cultural investigation in Hasan Minhaj’s stand-up comedy Homecoming King (2017). Through the amalgamation of political aesthetics and cultural civics, Lewis’ theorization of transculturalism offers an interesting approach for critical discourse analysis of racial injustice and inequality in Muslim American stand-up comedy. Minhaj uses persuasion games and language wars to highlight the dissonance in the dominant discourse about Islam. His goal is not to be a spokesperson for Muslim Americans but to provide new imaginings to the discussion of race, religion, and belonging in the context of Brown Americans in the post 9/11 era both within and outside the community.