Contesting Islamophobia in the novels can inadvertently endorse neoliberal individualism over communal identity

Evidence

Taken together, The Black Album and Brick Lane offer a strong rejection of what they depict as the misguided channels of minority-group community assertion. In both cases, political multiculturalism is shown to lead to the dead ends of censorship and personal oppression—especially of women. … For Nazneen in Ali’s novel, the celebration of autonomy and feminist agency comes at the expense of the rejection of community politics and an endorsement of the entrepreneurial spirit: a path that has come to be increasingly valorized as social modes of support have been deliberately attenuated by successive governments. This movement from identity to individualism also seems characteristic of a broader social shift in ways of looking at empowerment. … However, in an era when Islamophobic policies are increasingly being adopted by governments in the United States and Europe, there must come a point where the targeted disciplining of those who are not deemed acceptable (and accepting) free-market subjects produces direct conflict. It is not the job of novelists to produce programmatic blueprints for the coming struggle. Nevertheless, in novels such as The Black Album and Brick Lane we may see a roadmap that at least marks out part of the route by which we arrived here. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 199

Categorization

Category: Contrarian or Surprising Claims

• XREF: This gives the sharp critical vocabulary the reader needs: the novels’ feminist-autonomy arc trades community solidarity for entrepreneurial individualism — a lens to test against Hamid and Naqvi’s protagonists.
• SEED: Angle: does contesting Islamophobia through a liberal-individualist heroine merely rebrand the same free-market logic that disciplines Muslim subjects in the first place?

Related

• These novels reject community politics in favor of individualist liberal autonomy (similarity 0.94)
• A novel can contest Islamophobia while advancing a market-friendly multiculturalism doctrine (similarity 0.88)
• Islamophobic policies will collide with expanding economic inequality (similarity 0.85)
• The receptivity to being called ‘representative’ colors how novels get judged as multicultural (similarity 0.85)
• These novels replace multicultural communal assertion with liberal individualist autonomy (similarity 0.85)
• Liberal multicultural fiction can chronicle the forces that doom multiculturalism itself. (similarity 0.83)
• Novels articulate Muslim identity through either performative identity or private privatized faith (similarity 0.83)
• British multicultural novels track the rise of a post-Thatcherite neoliberal outlook. (similarity 0.81)
• Brick Lane’s political meaning is disputed between utopian and anti-community readings. (similarity 0.81)
• Brick Lane documents a shift toward market-friendly multiculturalism valuing autonomous individuals over communities. (similarity 0.81)
• Agency claims about Muslim women prop up Western women’s rejection of feminism (similarity 0.81)
• Muslim-working class tensions disguise resource struggles dressed as culture (similarity 0.81)
• Realist expectations keep criticism fixated on authenticity over societal meaning (similarity 0.80)
• Novels contesting Islamophobia are enmeshed in the very market that trades on it (similarity 0.80)
• Novels that critique Islamophobia still get co-opted by the market they critique. (similarity 0.80)