Asad holds that reading imaginative texts inevitably reproduces existing power structures

Evidence

In this understanding, literature itself becomes part of the problem, effectively a tool in the clash of civilizations. For example, writing of the Satanic Verses affair of 1989, Asad remarks: “In reading imaginative texts, we inevitably reproduce aspects of ourselves.… We are all already-constituted subjects, placed in networks of power, and in reproducing ourselves it is also the latter we reproduce. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 494

Categorization

• XREF: Directly relevant to the Zimbardo/Stanford prison framing in the reading purpose — Asad’s claim that reading reproduces power is the strong version of the situational-powers argument Morey tests against Hamid and Naqvi.