A novel can contest Islamophobia while advancing a market-friendly multiculturalism doctrine

Evidence

Although Brick Lane’s feminist message appears obvious, the question of the book’s relationship to the phenomenon of political multiculturalism tends to split opinion. One the one hand, there is the argument, advanced by critics such as Sara Upstone, that “the novel’s conclusion speaks obviously to the possibility of multicultural Britain,” with its “powerful utopianism representing the claims of British Muslims to British citizenship.” On the other stands the more sanguine view voiced by Rehana Ahmed that “a submission to patriarchal culture on the part of the Muslim woman is counterposed to an individual dissent and withdrawal from culture and community.” It is the latter view, borne out by the novel’s denouement, that emboldens me to suggest that Brick Lane is in fact a document of the end of socially egalitarian multiculturalism and the beginning of a multiculturalism that can be co-opted to produce successful market actors functioning always as autonomous individuals. In this kind of multiculturalism, community links are a hindrance to success, and the protagonist’s choices are valorized to the extent that they repudiate community values in favor of economic self-assertion. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 187

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the key distinction between socially egalitarian multiculturalism and a co-opted, market-oriented version that produces autonomous individual actors.
• XREF: This ‘market actor multiculturalism’ framing is the tool for reading Naqvi’s Home Boy and Hamid — which protagonists get valorized for repudiating community in favor of economic self-assertion?
• SEED: The close-reading lens that matters most: asking of any novel, does the protagonist’s triumph involve repudiating community for economic self-assertion — and does that quietly align the book with the liberal state’s preferred Muslim subject?