Contesting Islamophobia in fiction requires defamiliarizing narrative form, not merely invoking empathy.

Evidence

Arin Keeble suggests that The Submission rejects pure, authentic notions of identity and emphasizes internal divisions within characters as a way of undoing the reductive polarization of a clash-of-civilizations viewpoint (The 9/11 Novel: Trauma, Politics, and Identity [Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2014], 168, 170). — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 792 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim
• XREF: connects to: Fiction contests Islamophobia either by direct Islamic subjectivity or by oblique readerly defamiliarization.; Novels contest Islamophobia by foregrounding characters’ internal divisions — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 792; Novels encode their stance on Islamic identity through form as much as content. (+5 more)

Related

• Novels contest Islamophobia by foregrounding characters’ internal divisions (similarity 0.93)
• Thrillers can contest Islamophobic truisms by transgressing constructs of essential difference. (similarity 0.90)
• The novel treats political radicalization as displaced personal longing (similarity 0.90)
• Formal ambiguities can contest Islamophobia even in sympathetic texts (similarity 0.85)
• Novels encode their stance on Islamic identity through form as much as content. (similarity 0.85)
• Novels that foreground internal identity divisions can undo clash-of-civilizations polarization (similarity 0.84)
• Novels can reproduce or contest Islamophobia irrespective of authorial intent through formal features (similarity 0.84)
• The novel’s formal ambiguities can contest Islamophobic assumptions even in complicit texts (similarity 0.83)
• Contesting novels deconstruct the frames, not just the content, of the Islamophobia debate (similarity 0.83)
• Novels that aim for evenhandedness can leave the good Muslim-bad Muslim binary intact (similarity 0.83)
• The novel contests Islamophobia primarily through form, not content. (similarity 0.82)
• Ambivalence that never risks making a Muslim character bad is just liberal evasion. (similarity 0.81)
• Formal and thematic features jointly determine a novel’s relation to Islamophobia (similarity 0.80)
• Islamophobia-resisting fiction can work head-on or by unsettling readerly expectations (similarity 0.80)
• A novel can cite Orientalist cliches while undermining their authority through an unreliable focalizer. (similarity 0.80)

Broader Connections

• Novels encode their stance on Islamic identity through form as much as content. #corroborates (0.75)
• Novels contest Islamophobia by foregrounding characters’ internal divisions #expands (0.70) — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 792
• Formal ambiguities can contest Islamophobia even in sympathetic texts #expands (0.70)
• Literature resists Islamophobic universalism by structuring feeling and imagining alternative experiences #expands (0.65)