Cultural identities are political marriages of convenience more than organic belonging

Evidence

Thus, cultural identities tend less to be truly organic expressions of belonging or affiliation than marriages of convenience encouraged by the political ideologies of the time. Those liberal characters who are not denounced as hypocritical tend to be well meaning but misguided in their attitudes to cultural difference. Deedee packs her students’ curriculum with representative texts from black music and culture. Jimi Hendrix and Marvin Gaye provide a soundtrack to her teaching of the U.S. civil rights struggle, and she encourages her students to treat canonical and popular texts as interchangeable. Interestingly, though, whereas popular culture provides a valorized means of youth identification in The Buddha of Suburbia, it is treated with more suspicion in The Black Album. On the one hand, Shahid and Chad bond over their pop-music tastes. On the other, Kureishi’s determination to define art and culture as an antidote to religious fundamentalism requires that he reassert the liberal humanist reading of the European canon as personally liberating and culturally vitalizing. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 174

Categorization

• SEED: Morey is showing Kureishi’s liberal-humanist canon nostalgia: when anti-Islamophobia critique turns anti-identity, it smuggles back a pre-multicultural hierarchy of value. This is precisely the critical edge to test against Hamid’s and Naqvi’s handling of ‘authenticity.’