Culture functions as a proprietary boundary that excludes the deemed-inferior through state power.

Evidence

In thinking of culture, we can take Edward Said’s cue when he suggests that a culture is “not something to which one belongs but something that one possesses and, along with that proprietary process, culture also designates a boundary by which the concept of what is extrinsic or intrinsic to the culture come into forceful play.” Historically, this sense of culture has often been tied to the state in projects of national renewal or at times when hegemonic authority has felt under threat. Said remarks on the proximity of culture and the nation-state, an assimilation that is accompanied by “assurance, confidence, the majority sense, the entire matrix of meanings we associate with ‘home,’ belonging and community.” Yet this also means “that culture is a system of discriminations and evaluations[,] … a system of exclusions legislated from above but enacted through its polity, by which such things as anarchy, disorder, irrationality, inferiority, bad taste and immorality are identified, then deposited outside the culture and kept there by the power of the State and its institutions.” — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 75

Categorization

• DEFINE: The operative definition of culture borrowed from Said: possessable boundary, not belonging — this is the critical vocabulary for analyzing how Muslims get deposited outside ‘our culture.’
• XREF: Directly usable for the reader’s hinge work — the exclusion mechanism here describes exactly what confronts Changez and Shakeb in the two novels.