A publishing market selects and rewards fiction that rehearses existing Muslim stereotypes

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

Category: Contrarian or Surprising Claims

• DEFINE: Defines the ‘market for the Muslim’ — the core analytical concept that explains both why contesting texts get read and why they often fail.
• SEED: Article: how the ‘market for the Muslim’ explains which Islam-related novels get prize-shortlisted and which die unpublished — and what it means for Hamid’s success.
• XREF: Directly bridges to The Reluctant Fundamentalist and Home Boy — both are evidence of realism being the privileged register for Muslim-authored fiction.

Related

• A market exists that rewards fiction reproducing existing views of Muslims. (similarity 0.90)
• A global literary market for Muslim writers shapes what can be written (similarity 0.87)
• Novels contesting Islamophobia are enmeshed in the very market that trades on it (similarity 0.87)
• Anti-Islamophobia novels can themselves profit from trading in Muslim stereotypes. (similarity 0.85)
• Novels that critique Islamophobia still get co-opted by the market they critique. (similarity 0.84)
• Muslim-authored novels are read as collective representative documents rather than individual explorations (similarity 0.83)
• A global literary market for Muslim writing constrains how novels contest Islamophobia. (similarity 0.83)
• Global market language biases shape which Muslim-authored fiction circulates (similarity 0.82)
• Realist renderings of Muslim experience are fated to be co-opted by the anthropological frame (similarity 0.82)
• Literary criticism should read Muslim texts as intercultural negotiation, not alien-mind keys (similarity 0.82)
• Dominant frames of understanding constrain reception, not Muslim authors’ choices themselves (similarity 0.81)
• Literature embedded in global markets may be unable to contest capitalism’s Islamophobia (similarity 0.81)
• Anti-Islamophobic fiction is embedded in the very capitalist culture industry it contests (similarity 0.81)
• Muslim-authored fiction is read as transparent anthropology, not as art (similarity 0.80)
• Novels can reproduce or contest Islamophobia irrespective of authorial intent through formal features (similarity 0.80)