Brick Lane documents a shift toward market-friendly multiculturalism valuing autonomous individuals over communities.

Evidence

It is the latter view, borne out by the novel’s denouement, that emboldens me to suggest that Brick Lane is in fact a document of the end of socially egalitarian multiculturalism and the beginning of a multiculturalism that can be co-opted to produce successful market actors functioning always as autonomous individuals. In this kind of multiculturalism, community links are a hindrance to success, and the protagonist’s choices are valorized to the extent that they repudiate community values in favor of economic self-assertion. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 187

Categorization

• XREF: Directly analyzable tool for reading Naqvi’s Home Boy and Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist — both feature protagonists whose trajectories test whether community repudiation or solidarity is valorized.
• DEFINE: Establishes Morey’s key distinction between egalitarian multiculturalism (valuing community) and co-optable multiculturalism (producing market actors as autonomous individuals) — the vocabulary for the contesting-vs-reinforcing hinge.
• SEED: Angle: Bhuiyan/Jenkins-style subject formation — the ‘good Muslim’ as successful market actor whose choice to repudiate community is itself the ideological prize.