Research

My research, broadly conceived, centers humor, Islam, race, and gender. In particular, I am interested in bringing together these phenomena to look at the relationship between religion and state structures, secularism, and what it means/what it takes to be publicly legible in the United States. In 2021, the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding awarded me their annual Young Scholar Award for my work.

My manuscript, titled American Muslim Humor and the Politics of Secularity, will be the first book-length analysis of American Muslim standup comedy as an embodied performance of secular communication. In it, I explore how humor mediates the link between Islam and modern secular subjecthood in the U.S., complicating the categories of race, ethnicity, masculinity, and religion at their core. I argue that humor is a mode of secular discourse, and the ability to laugh at oneself has become a prized personality trait within secular social schemas. In such a “humor regime,” the gendered and racialized Muslim body becomes a signifier of communal exclusion and religious difference: a site upon which comedic performances of the “Right Muslim Man” are enacted, embraced, and upheld as exemplary.

This study relies on a critical analysis of films, television shows, and standup routines by the comedians Aziz Ansari, Kumail Nanjiani, and Hasan Minhaj. I chart the shifting goalposts that demarcate when humor becomes explicitly recognized as Muslim and when these comedians are overdetermined as ethnic “brown” subjects instead. Bodily inscriptions of sexuality and race make Nanjiani, Minhaj, and Ansari hypervisible across the U.S. pop culture terrain due to apprehensions evoked by discourses of securitization, masculinity, and white supremacy. The comedy that these men stage in their routines offers a vocal fidelity to American secularism by keeping specific cultural discourses intact: American exceptionalism, capitalist pursuits, as well as gender and racial hierarchies that maintain anti-Blackness and the prestige of white women. Their performances also rely on a suburbanized incorporation of Black American aesthetics (language, comportment, and affect) that seek to authenticate these brown men as “subversively” American while still distanced from the vulnerabilities that accompany being raced and read as Black. Minhaj, Ansari, and Nanjiani, as a result, situate themselves as ideal secular subjects, aligning with the organizing identity logics of the nation. Here, Islam is represented as interchangeable with race - categorically different, but still manageable under a secular hegemon of multiculturalism. Islam as a racial category finds social legibility. Islam as a religious category, however, is limited in its recourse.

This project makes several theoretical contributions to studies of race, ethnicity, religion, performance, and masculinities. While much scholarship on contemporary Muslims continues to make oblique reference to their “compatibility” with modernity, I instead lay bare the coloniality of this question, revamped for a postcolonial reception. What is the role of humor – a seemingly universal category of communication – in rendering Muslims legible under the specter of secular equity? I reconsider popular discourses that authenticate Islam as an American racialized category – something that can be read off the body – in the face of growing institutional calls for diversity measures. Such a muddling of race and religion points to a critical need to think about how religion is constituted less through sincerity and belief, but through somatic responses, material realities, and everyday encounters between people.