Islamophobia-resisting fiction can work head-on or by unsettling readerly expectations

Evidence

From there, we can ask whether the most effective imaginative modes of combating Islamophobia are to be found in a head-on engagement that seeks to reassert the value of a life oriented around Islamic subjectivity, or whether a more oblique approach that plays with readerly expectations and hence prejudices can more effectively destabilize norms of thinking. The distinction at first sight appears to be between a novel that challenges established ways of seeing and one that attempts to convey the immediate personal experience of life and faith from an Islamic perspective. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 440

Categorization

• DEFINE: Establishes the two-mode framework — head-on Islamic subjectivity versus oblique, reader-expectation-playing critique — that structures the whole chapter and the reader’s hinge.
• XREF: The ‘oblique approach that plays with readerly expectations’ is exactly the reader’s own question about whether Naqvi and Hamid contest or quietly reinforce.