Fiction can reinforce racial stereotypes even while nominally condemning extremism

Evidence

As a Bangladeshi woman, Asma’s ability to traverse even the immigrant spaces of New York is severely circumscribed. She rarely ventures out from her home in Little Dhaka, as their part of Brooklyn is known, considering Manhattan “like another country” (71). Moreover, in a move that perhaps indicates that The Submission, despite its concern for stereotyping in the media, does not always escape stereotypes of its own, the restraints on Asma are depicted as cultural as well as Islamophobic. She begins as the archetypal oppressed Muslim woman, cowed by the patriarchal conventions of her community. Her tentative attempts to break free of tradition are crushed under the weight of convention and respectability—as when she attempts to rescue a neighbor from domestic abuse but finds her efforts rejected even by the victim, whose concern is primarily for reputation. Arin Keeble suggests that “the characterization of Asma that emerges,” despite this surface image, “is of a strong compassionate woman who won’t accept her husband being written out of history.” That may be so, but her ultimate fate reveals the combined weight of a paranoid host nation and an imposed collective responsibility to community. Her decision to speak up for Mo’s design at the public hearing brings plaudits from many Americans, who see her as acting against silencing oppression by Muslim males. Yet it also brings renewed scrutiny to her own residency status and that of fellow members of the Bangladeshi community in New York, many of whom are also irregular, and leads to an order for her expedited removal from the country. Her murder at the hands of an unknown knifeman—Is he a right-wing extremist or an outraged Bangladeshi community member?—takes place in the full glare of the nation’s media, for whom she has become a cause célèbre. In Waldman’s novel, there is no question but that those most directly at risk from hatred and Islamophobia will always pay the highest price. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 292 (#exemplifies, via linked claim)

Categorization

• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim
• XREF: connects to: Modern science extended, not ended, the fiction of racial inferiority.; Transparent realist form cannot escape the reader’s prevailing prejudices; Individual migrant sympathy in fiction rarely extends to migrant communities. (+11 more)

Related

• Novels encode their stance on Islamic identity through form as much as content. (similarity 0.90)
• A novel can undermine its own polyphonic argument by monolithically portraying Muslims. (similarity 0.90)
• A novel contesting Islamophobia can still quietly reinforce liberal-manichean binaries in its characterization. (similarity 0.90)
• A liberal-humanist stance toward novels can itself smuggle in Islamophobic assumptions (similarity 0.89)
• Evenhanded novelistic treatment can falsely equate anti-Islamophobia activists with Islamophobes (similarity 0.87)
• Islamophobia in literature can reside in universalist reading practices rather than overt denunciation (similarity 0.86)
• Anti-Islamophobic novels can still reproduce the stereotype of the oppressed Muslim woman (similarity 0.86)
• A novel can expose stereotypes yet trap its own character within them (similarity 0.81)
• Transparent realist form cannot escape the reader’s prevailing prejudices (similarity 0.80)
• The Muslim woman functions as a fixed stereotype absorbing cross-discourse readings (similarity 0.79)
• Even distinguished literary novelists voice crude anti-Muslim prejudice (similarity 0.79)

Broader Connections

• Anti-Islamophobic novels can still reproduce the stereotype of the oppressed Muslim woman #exemplifies (0.85) — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 292
• A novel can expose stereotypes yet trap its own character within them #expands (0.80)
• A novel can undermine its own polyphonic argument by monolithically portraying Muslims. #exemplifies (0.80)
• Contesting Islamophobia in the novels can inadvertently endorse neoliberal individualism over communal identity #exemplifies (0.70)
• Liberal novels often center non-Muslim protagonists in Islamophobia stories #exemplifies (0.60) — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 355
• A liberal-humanist stance toward novels can itself smuggle in Islamophobic assumptions #qualifies (0.60)
• Islamophobia in literature can reside in universalist reading practices rather than overt denunciation #expands (0.55)