Expatriate focalizers can flatter reader superiority while depicting failing Muslim nations

Evidence

Exotic foods are again presented; Eid is explained for the uninitiated; and when Amir returns to a denuded Kabul as an adult, we have a lengthy journalistic description of the privations of life under the Taliban. As in Nafisi’s book, such impressions, fed to us by our focalizer Amir, now a resident of the liberal city San Francisco, flatters a readerly sense of cultural superiority at the same time as it evokes a familiar image of the perennially failing Muslim nation. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 245

Categorization

• XREF: The focalizer-in-liberal-West technique directly parallels both The Reluctant Fundamentalist and Home Boy — the reader’s core hinge — since Changez and Shaman also narrate from a Western vantage.