Post 9/11 American Dramas: A Postmodern Postcolonial Study of Wajahat Ali’s The Domestic Crusaders and John Shanley’s Dirty Story

The focal point of this study is the date 9/11 which history immortalized as it witnessed the sudden attacks on one of the world’s super powers, the United States of America. The repercussions of this date boomed in the world’s four corners leaving behind feelings of insecurity and fears from the unknown. Whereas 9/11 had many influences on the international and domestic economic, political and social arenas, such influences were reflected in the literary arena as well. Many American playwrights were influenced by the attacks to the extent that such attacks have become the raw material formulating the dramatic substance of their post 9/11 plays and have induced the plays' dramatic conflicts. This study probes into postmodernism and postcolonialism, as two interrelated literary approaches having many intersecting points, to unravel the ideological and textual significance of the 9/11 events as depicted in the two post 9/11 American dramas: The Domestic Crusaders (2005) by Wajahat Ali (1980-) and  Dirty Story (2003) by John Shanley (1950-). The study, moreover, proves that the combination of postmodern and postcolonial notions of marginality versus the centrality, cultural hybridity, and the representation of history along with examples of metaphor, irony, allegory, intertextuality, and metatheatre at unequal intervals in both plays stresses that the dramatic meaning of the date 9/11 is explicitly simple and transparent but implicitly sophisticated and multisided.