Critics weaponize anti-PC exam critique to demean minoritized literary worth.

Evidence

Yet this is not all that connects their two worldviews. Amis’s second target is political correctness, which he sees as having become dominant in the British secondary-school approach to literature: a symptom of anti-intellectualism resulting in a “hypocritical piety” (18). “The language and literature papers in our national exams,” he notes, “are becoming invitations to ideological conformity; and everyone knows that there are few marks to be had for bucking the earnest line on, say, Maya Angelou” (18). Here a potentially salient point about the limitations of the examination system is overshadowed by the supposedly casual choice of Maya Angelou as herald of what the essay calls a “literature of ingratiation” (18). The effect is to cast aspersions on the literary worth of culturally (and racially) different experience. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 101

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the books Islamophobia and the Novel reads against, and to the reader’s own analysis of how Hamid and Naqvi get treated in reviews—possibly under the same ‘politically correct’ dismissal.
• SEED: Reads as the diagnostic move in a review or essay: how a putatively neutral complaint about exam orthodoxy smuggles in a racial hierarchy of literary value.