A market exists that rewards fiction reproducing existing views of Muslims.

Evidence

In this book, I argue that this approach creates what we might call a market for the Muslim. This means that texts from around the world that engage with the existing political articulation of “the Muslim problem,” contain the right elements, and offer some kind of “authentic” pseudoanthropological insight will be published, circulated, reviewed, and critiqued more or less to the extent that they reproduce existing cultural viewpoints. (They can be hostile to or in tension with these viewpoints, but as long as they rehearse them, they will be recognized and accepted.) This is how framing works. So the market for the Muslim has both aesthetic and economic dimensions. Such texts are seen as offering windows onto rare and “exotic” areas of minority experience in the West that are also sites of political anxiety in the case of Muslims. This view enforces a set of criteria that then tends to privilege texts with a realist bent. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 24

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The ‘market for the Muslim’ thesis — that hostile and sympathetic texts alike get published precisely when they rehearse dominant framings — is the chapter’s paradigm-shifting move with direct analytic payoff for the reader’s project.
• XREF: This is the sharpest tool for the reader’s guiding question: a novel can be critical yet still feed the market. Directly applicable to judging how Naqvi and Hamid position their protagonists. — connects to: Syrian merchants profited by supplying America’s Orientalist consumer fantasies — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 226; The threat of a fatwa against a critic was marketed to boost book sales; Public awards and sales reward Muslim critics who perform defiance of their own community. (+3 more)
• QUESTION: What exactly distinguishes ‘rehearsing’ a viewpoint from ‘contesting’ it? The parenthetical (hostile or in tension but recognized if they rehearse) seems to blur the contest-vs-reinforce line the reader is hunting.
• ADDENDUM: Structurally parallels the ‘Complaints About Immodesty’ insight that moral panics are reproduced through performance of expected tropes.