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Author ORCID Identifier

0009-0009-0163-0446

Abstract

Institutions often arrive at certainty before they arrive at knowledge. This article names that mechanism institutional non-inquiry — the organizational habit through which visual and cultural assumptions substitute for direct verification, allowing identity classifications to solidify before the subject meaningfully enters the encounter. Unlike prejudice, racialization, or established theories of pre-reflexive social perception, institutional non-inquiry isolates the organizational encounter itself as the specific procedural moment at which collective interpretive habits make inquiry feel unnecessary. Examining Abrogation (2024), a micro-budget American independent feature following Daud Khan, a Brown Pakistani-American infectious disease specialist whose movement through evangelical, civic, and federal institutions repeatedly exposes this failure, this article draws on recognition theory, postcolonial visual analysis, and post-9/11 racialization studies. Comparative formal analysis of The Reluctant Fundamentalist (Nair, 2012) and Amreeka (Dabis, 2009) establishes what Abrogation uniquely contributes: a double movement absent from both films — the imposition of Muslim identity before inquiry occurs, followed by institutional incredulity once that identity is corrected. That incredulity is the article's central diagnostic finding: it reveals that the interpretive framework organizing the misrecognition survives the moment of correction intact. The Brown Christian body — misread as Muslim inside institutions that imagine themselves theologically literate — is the figure that makes this failure visible. Abrogation is the analytical occasion. Institutional non-inquiry is the transferable contribution.

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

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30

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