Disgraced

by

Ayad Akhtar

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Themes and Colors
Unintentional Racism and Resentment Theme Icon
Cultural Appropriation Theme Icon
Islamophobia, Oppression, and Institutional Racism Theme Icon
Shame, Anger, and Disgrace Theme Icon
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Disgraced, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.

Unintentional Racism and Resentment

In Disgraced, Amir Kapoor (who’s South Asian and was raised Muslim but has renounced Islam) and his wife Emily (who’s white) seem to have a progressive interracial marriage and worldly, liberal-minded friends from different backgrounds. Emily celebrates Amir’s Muslim culture much more than Amir himself does, and the couple’s friends Jory (who’s Black) and Isaac (who’s Jewish) see themselves as well-traveled and open-minded. Nonetheless, Emily often says unintentionally offensive things to Amir about his…

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Cultural Appropriation

In Disgraced, Emily is a young white artist whose painting career takes off when she starts using Islamic patterns in her work. Emily’s use of Islamic imagery is problematic because she’s appropriating (borrowing from) and profiting off a culture that doesn’t belong to her. She also paints a portrait of her husband, Amir (a wealthy South Asian lawyer), as a former slave who’s become rich—suggesting that she sees him as an outsider to affluent…

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Islamophobia, Oppression, and Institutional Racism

Disgraced highlights the widespread discrimination that Muslim Americans face on a daily basis. Amir and his nephew Abe fear discrimination to the point that they change their names to mask their Muslim heritage—and the play suggests that such fears are actually justified, since all of the Muslim characters in the play experience institutional racism. For instance, Muslim cleric Imam Fareed is wrongly accused of funding terrorists after he collects charity money for his community, showing…

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Shame, Anger, and Disgrace

Disgraced explores how shame about core aspects of one’s identity can create lasting traumas. Amir Kapoor is a wealthy lawyer of Pakistani descent, and he lives in an upscale New York apartment with his beautiful wife Emily (who’s white). On the surface, it looks like Amir’s affluent lifestyle give him all he needs to be happy. The reader soon learns, however, that Amir feels pressured to suppress his cultural heritage, leading to frequent angry outbursts…

read analysis of Shame, Anger, and Disgrace