Jews and Muslims in Globalization Literature and Theory From William Shakespeare to Ayad Akhtar.

The use of Jewishness as a trope for understanding contemporary economic theories arguably originates with Karl Marx's characterization of the commodity as an "inwardly circumcised Jew", which Slavoj Žižek extends to include money itself. The notion of commodity is central to contemporary economic and globalization theory, and Marx's characterization of it has gone largely unchallenged. At a time when circumcision as a religious practice is once again controversial, we would do well to attend to such discourse. I contend that many of the discourses and problems that inhere to both popular and theoretical constructions of globalization – such as circumcision, nationalism and cosmopolitanism – impact Muslims and Jews alike, often in strikingly parallel and interconnected ways. By way of illustration, I undertake a reading of the literary oeuvre of Ayad Akhtar, a Muslim-American writer of Pakistani descent. While his work is best known for its critical examination of the place and identity of the American Muslim in the post-9/11 world, I argue Jewish–Muslim intimacy is the key to Akhtar's identity politics, a fact which reframes questions of globalization, and ought to trouble its contemporary theorizations. Far from being a subject of theological or ethnographic interest, I contend that the Jew in the literature and culture of South Asia and its diaspora provides a set of discursive practices for negotiating transnational and non-local identities, such as South Asian Muslim, diasporic Indian and global citizen. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]