Identity under Islamophobia fragments between self and imposed public image

Evidence

However, the text shows us that whatever posturing might take place is a product of a context in which Islamophobia and rampant stereotyping put pressure on participants, driving a wedge between sense of self and public image. Mo is at the center of a perfect storm of misrepresentation. As a Muslim, he is automatically branded a terrorist by the right-wing press. When news spreads that a Muslim has won the memorial design competition, in the absence of a photograph newspapers mock up a silhouette headshot of a terrorist in a balaclava (51–52). In her stories about him, Alyssa Spier writes in clichés and prefers to use his full first name, Mohammed, because “Mo didn’t have the ring—theological, historical, hysterical” (96)—to elicit the required response. If Islamophobic stereotyping is the most blatant and obvious in the book, Mo also feels under pressure from more well-meaning attempts to manage his image through public relations. The attempts by Issam Malik’s organization, MACC, to “humanize” him as a proud American (172) and to make him a figurehead for other campaigns (80) feel just as artificial to him. We are invited to reflect on the extent to which Mo as a public figure is made up by others—a patchwork of their darkest fears or utopian fantasies—and the extent to which identity is continually being shaped by experience. In the maelstrom of controversy, Mo—like Claire, who imagines her identity in terms of a series of nested matryoshka dolls—has difficulty locating a final, core identity for himself, something that might in the end have a liberating effect. He tells a girlfriend, “Everyday I’m different.… I’m not the person you met three weeks ago. If this keeps up, in two weeks I won’t be the person you know now. You can’t misrepresent an object in motion”(155). … From Indian restaurant workers and Pakistani news vendors to Bengali storekeepers and Muslim subway station managers, the life of South Asian citizens of New York is depicted as precarious after 9/11, even as they go about their daily business. In some respects, Mo, the ultimately successful, renowned architect, and Claire, the privileged white woman, emerge relatively unscathed from the controversy and its fallout. The same cannot be said for the book’s main representative Muslim woman, Asma Anwar. Her illegal immigrant husband, Inam, is another Twin Towers victim. As an undocumented worker with no official right to be in the country, Inam enjoys no legal recognition; to all intents and purposes he does not exist. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 288

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘object in motion’ and lack of core identity directly parallels Changez in The Reluctant Fundamentalist, whose shifting self-presentation to the American interlocutor is exactly this dynamic; also resonates with Homesickness (Naqvi) where photo-sensitive second-generation characters are similarly interpellated. — connects to: the MOC “The Wound of the Label: When Knowing Someone Becomes a Way of Erasing Them”; the MOC “The Enemy-Making Machine: How Ourselves, the True, and Every Other Are Built from War”
• QUESTION: Does Morey elsewhere distinguish the privileged reflective irony of Mo/Claire from what Asma Anwar and other marginal figures experience — a structural asymmetry worth chasing to sort contesting vs. reinforcing readings.