Both essentialist and liberal-tolerant framings of difference reinforce Western normativity

Evidence

In the erection and codification of “our” values—that which separates “us” from “them”—the categories are not neutral. Indeed, these categories are produced by and in turn are productive of Western normativity. They tend to view culture as essential and formative as opposed to constructed and negotiable. Culture talk tends to reify cultures as objects that have attributes driving individual behavior. This has led to attacks on Islam for its supposedly inevitable and predictable impact on its adherents, usually traced back to the myth that the Quran supposedly forces a literal interpretation and thus determines behavior, whereas the Bible and in turn Christianity have a tradition of critical interpretation. In assuming that culture causes people to do certain things, this view also exoticizes the Other—although, as we will see later in the book, this exoticization is less about cozy commodification and more about the frisson of vicariously experienced threat. More-liberal positions tend toward a minimization of difference on the basis of notions of a “shared humanity.” Such familiar modes of categorization fail to recognize their own cultural privilege and support for a universal system. Tolerance is mistaken for good citizenship in a move that eventually tends to yield to demands for assimilation when its notions of acceptable difference are challenged. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 79

Categorization

• QUESTION: The claim that liberal tolerance collapses into assimilationism and itself reifies Western normativity is the precise analytical edge a reading of Morey’s novels tests.
• XREF: This distinction between overt essentialism and covert universalism is exactly the spectrum along which Hamid’s and Naqvi’s novels place themselves. — connects to: Emphasizing essential cultural difference feeds the clash-of-civilizations frame — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 256; Acknowledging cultural difference can compound rather than resolve essentialism by implying boundedness — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 949
• DEFINE: Why exoticization reads as threat not commodity — names the mechanism linking representation to fear.
• SEED: Angles for arguing The Reluctant Fundamentalist as contesting culture talk by dramatizing its collapse into assimilation demands.