Dismissing multiculturalism as political betrays that monoculture is political too

Evidence

The values enshrined in the great novels of the Western canon are claimed to operate irrespective of social, geographical, or any other context, and their meanings are claimed to be singular and unequivocal. Nafisi articulates a deeply conservative view of literature and criticism in keeping with those other near-contemporary volleys in the so-called curriculum wars of the 1980s and 1990s. As a response to the new, vigorous assertion of black rights as well as broader patterns of postimperial population movement, questions were raised from the 1970s on about the representativeness of the established canon of great literary works as an educational tool in the multicultural societies of the West. In the United States in particular, in tandem with minority self-assertion and a rise in migration from Latin America and Asia, moves were made to adjust university course content, to amend textbooks and anthologies to reflect the new demographics, and to challenge established white male hegemony. In this moment of multiculturalism, cultural pluralism was placed against melting-pot assimilationism. In response, a conservative backlash accused multiculturalists of introducing the taint of politics into the sacred and supposedly neutral space of Great Art. … In reality, as David Theo Goldberg has pointed out, the struggle is one over visions of what America is and who should control it: “If the political charge against multiculturalism has meaning, then it implies that monocultural commitments are political also; indeed, that the struggle between them in the final analysis can be played out only on political terrain.” — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 230

Categorization

• DEFINE: Profiles the conservative view of canon literature (context-free singular meaning) versus the multicultural view — the analytical distinction the reader needs for Hamid and Naqvi.
• XREF: Connects to the reader’s own argument about Islamophobia: the curriculum-wars framing of literature as transcendent vs. situated maps onto how novels contest or reinforce Islamophobia. — connects to: Multiculturalism backlash aims to stop epistemology from being questioned in class — bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as…, 272; Ultranationalism arises from the failure of class politics — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1851