Islamophobic policies will collide with expanding economic inequality

Evidence

This movement from identity to individualism also seems characteristic of a broader social shift in ways of looking at empowerment. Nowadays, concern for egalitarianism and group rights is seen as less “sexy” than personal economic fulfillment as an active consumer. It remains to be seen how the inevitably widening inequalities produced by neoliberal economics react with what will by necessity become louder calls for redistributive justice. In one way or another, multiculturalism has proven remarkably durable, and claims of its demise are certainly exaggerated. … However, in an era when Islamophobic policies are increasingly being adopted by governments in the United States and Europe, there must come a point where the targeted disciplining of those who are not deemed acceptable (and accepting) free-market subjects produces direct conflict. It is not the job of novelists to produce programmatic blueprints for the coming struggle. Nevertheless, in novels such as The Black Album and Brick Lane we may see a roadmap that at least marks out part of the route by which we arrived here. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 199

Categorization

• XREF: Links to Changez’s trajectory in The Reluctant Fundamentalist — the ‘acceptable free-market subject’ who is disciplined once his market acceptability lapses.
• SEED: Article angle: reading Hamid and Naqvi as ‘roadmaps’ showing how post-9/11 Muslim characters get disciplined not as Muslims but as insufficiently pliant market subjects.