Culture talk emerged post-Cold War as a politicized explanation for global conflict.

Evidence

Mahmood Mamdani has usefully explained how the post-9/11 phenomenon of an assumed unbridgeable cultural gulf has emerged in the table talk of policy makers and opinion formers. Locating “culture talk,” as he calls it, as part of the latest phase in a much longer story of U.S. post-Vietnam global political engagements, Mamdani suggests that the era since the Cold War has seen the “ascendancy and rapid politicizing of a single term: culture.” — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 76

Categorization

• DEFINE: Mamdani’s ‘culture talk’ is introduced as a named framework — a term the reader can deploy to describe how Hamid and Naqvi are being received or can be read against.
• XREF: Connects to the reader’s guiding question about distinguishing contesting from reinforcing Islamophobia; Mamdani’s culture talk is a tool for framing both novels’ context. — connects to: Post-Cold War conflict was framed by Huntington as civilizational cultural clash — Sarah Bracke and Luis Manuel Hernández Aguilar, “They Love Death as We Love Life”: The…, 174
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: does the novel as a form necessarily complicate culture talk, given its built-in point of view, or can it also reproduce it?