Absolute advocacy of individual rights masks hierarchies empowering its advocates

Evidence

Rehana Ahmed has noted how this debate was throughout marked by fault lines of class, race, and religion as the culturally privileged author, Monica Ali, and her reviewers sought to invoke individual imaginative freedom against the collective outrage of those taken to be the book’s subjects. She points out that “an absolute advocacy of individual rights obscures the social hierarchies which give some individuals more access to those rights than others[,] … [while the protestors’ concerns were] in part rooted in their vulnerability as members of a minority racialised group with a history of poverty and exclusion.” She also makes the important observation that the difference between the Rushdie and Brick Lane controversies lies in the fact that the former was grounded in the assertion of a group religious identity, whereas the latter was concerned with local and cultural disrespect (“Brick Lane: A Materialist Reading of the Novel and Its Reception,” Race and Class 52, no. 2 : 25–42, quote on 29). — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 662

Categorization

• XREF: The contest-vs-reinforce axis: liberal individual-freedom rhetoric can itself be a form of silencing. Relevant to how Changez or Hamid’s narrators frame voice. — connects to: Human rights advocates legitimized progressive-sounding counterinsurgency warfare — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 493; Treating human rights as endlessly polyvalent masks the systemic constraints shaping them. — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights…, 62
• DEFINE: Defines a key mechanism by which putatively freedom-defending fiction quietly reinforces power asymmetries.