Empathy-driven novels with liberal humanist values are recognizably conventional even when politically critical.

Evidence

Both The Wasted Vigil and Burnt Shadows are concerned to make us feel with the protagonists, to create an authenticity that will bring us nearer to their experiences. Moreover, both are imbued with an underlying liberal humanism that means that, in the end, their efforts at evoking a particular kind of empathy in the reader and securing assent to certain values are of a recognizable, placeable kind. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 436

Categorization

• XREF: Directly relevant to the reader’s hinge question — whether Naqvi and Hamid’s empathy-based strategies risk the same ‘recognizable, placeable’ liberal humanism Morey flags in Aslam and Shamsie.
• QUESTION: Does a recognizable, placeable liberal-humanist frame inevitably blunt a post-9/11 novel’s contestatory power, or can convention itself carry contestation?