My name is Khan

critical perspectives on identity, capitalism and religiosity from a film

Abstract

as an arbitrary economic system, capitalism precipitates conflicts, manufactures enemies, imposes languages, aesthetics, policies, interpersonal relationships, cultural and social behaviors that in many circumstances are equally perverse and relentlessly intransigent, reactive, repressive and reductionist. My Name is Khan, a film released in 2010 under the direction of Karan Johar, serves as a panel to illustrate and, through verisimilitude, expose how these processes of curtailing sociological imagination, perspectives and socio-cultural relations can occur within political and economic empires. By telling the fictional story of Rizwan Khan, a Muslim man who suffers from Asperger's Syndrome and tries his luck in the city of San Francisco, the plot demonstrates the rise of prejudice against Arabs, the intensification of religious intolerance against Islam and the exacerbation of American nationalism that occurred after the attacks on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. This essay reflects on these issues, on the direct links between imperialism and intolerant conceptions of the world, in order to criticize the financial system which, among other evils, also gives rise to summary types of violence.