Jews and Muslims in Globalization Literature and Theory From William Shakespeare to Ayad Akhtar
Bibliographic record
Abstract
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.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.015 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".