A novel’s ambivalence can quietly reinforce the very stereotypes it claims to contest

Evidence

Yet despite—or perhaps because of—this urge to measure and judge warring positions against one another, The Submission ends up falling into the classic liberal trap of seeing both sides of an argument but being unable to accept the necessity of choosing between them. For instance, the text’s urge to recuperate its Muslim characters onto the “good Muslim” side of the “good Muslim/bad Muslim” balance sheet merely leaves the criterion in place. There is never any chance that Mo will turn out to be a “bad Muslim” in these terms, so the book’s much-vaunted ambivalence is slightly bogus. Although it aims to get beyond these categories, its deployment of representative types does not, in the end, challenge conventions of framing. It is more successful in understanding Mo’s intransigence and hostility as a piece of defensive self-stereotyping and a (perhaps necessary) tactical betrayal of his better judgment. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 294

Categorization

• XREF: Directly gives the reader their guiding criterion for adjudicating The Reluctant Fundamentalist and Home Boy: does liberal even-handedness leave the good/bad Muslim binary intact? The same test could be run on Hamid’s and Naqvi’s novels.
• DEFINE: Establishes the critical vocabulary ‘good Muslim/bad Muslim balance sheet’ and ‘structuring liberalism’ — precisely the contesting-vs-reinforcing distinction the reader wants.
• SEED: An essay angle: ‘when ambivalence becomes alibi’ — how even-handedness in liberal fiction about Islamophobia functions as a form of the very framing it criticizes, applied to Hamid and Naqvi.