A novel can undercut anti-racist history by re-framing political violence as internal gang conflict.

Evidence

Skirmishes between the Tigers and racists culminate in a riot that swirls round the streets of East London, taking in the landmarks of earlier battles: Cable Street, where antifascists confronted Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirts in the 1930s, and Altab Ali Park, renamed to commemorate a Bengali textile worker murdered by racists in 1978. Yet even this historical resonance is undercut because the riot is depicted as intracommunal, “brown-on-brown,” a product of gang culture and revenge. Karim remarks despairingly, “It’s not even about anything any more” (475). — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 193

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘brown-on-brown’ reframing that deflates antiracist struggle is a strong candidate for how fiction quietly reinforces rather than contests Islamophobia.
• QUESTION: This ideological undercutting of political violence is exactly the contest-vs-reinforce lever to study in the reader’s two novels.