Kureishi’s fiction directs sympathy by rewarding embrace of postmodern fluidity

Evidence

Kureishi himself recognizes the attraction of religion as a bulwark of certainty against the fluidity of the postmodern world. In his essay collection The Word and the Bomb (London: Faber and Faber, 2005), he suggests that “fundamentalist Islam is an ideology that began to flourish in a conspicuous age of plenty in the West, and at a time of media expansion” (84). Even if this explanation might be too “West-centric,” it is clear that texts such as The Black Album and “My Son the Fanatic” inscribe what Sara Upstone has called a “postmodern didacticism,” directing our sympathy for characters according to whether they embrace the fluidity and potential for reinvention offered by modern popular culture and urban living (British Asian Fiction, 44). — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 673

Categorization

• DEFINE: “Postmodern didacticism” is a named critical concept for how a text steers sympathy by rewarding embrace of fluidity — a transferable category.
• XREF: This connects to Morey’s core distinction between contesting vs. quietly reinforcing Islamophobia — and to how The Reluctant Fundamentalist’s ambivalence works against any simple sympathizing.