Abstract

This study examines Ayad Akhtar's American Dervish (2012) as a literary investigation into taboo, silence, and transgression in the context of the Muslim-American diasporic community. Employing the established theory of Foucault, Bataille, Butler, and Derrida alongside other thinkers, this examination analyzes how Akhtar uses language, silence, and narrative ellipsis to challenge religious orthodoxy, gendered confinement, and cultural control. It demonstrates how acts of transgression, dietary transgression, interfaith union, and retrospection narrative become symbolic provocations to institutionalized religion and community control. Silence emerges as at once a survival mechanism and a means of transgression and comes to bear on the identity of protagonists and underscores the limitations of representation. The findings indicate that Akhtar reimagines taboo as a performative literary device, challenging moral absolutism and creating discursive spaces for the negotiation of hybridity, identity, and self-sovereignty in a transnational context. By placing American Dervish in the larger body of scholarship debating religion, liberty, and diasporic identity, this paper contributes to the ongoing discussion regarding power, gender, and cultural representation in the body of the prevalent contemporary Muslim-American literary world.

Key words: taboo; transgression; diaspora; religious orthodoxy; gender; hybridity; cultural representation