Liberal multicultural fiction can chronicle the forces that doom multiculturalism itself.

Evidence

Here we confront the paradox by which one of the writers who has been seen as most representative of socially liberal British multiculturalism produces a text chronicling those forces that in the early years of the twenty-first century would lead to its disavowal. Multiculturalism apparently carries within it the seeds of its own destruction. The question then becomes what takes its place. If The Black Album (like The Buddha of Suburbia) is aware that the rough and tumble of the multicultural metropolis is always shadowed by the rapaciousness of a looming Thatcherite materialism that will be interested in cultural coexistence only to the extent that it can be packaged and sold, Brick Lane goes a stage farther by performing the process whereby a version of multiculturalism can be brought to reject communal solidarity altogether in favor of individual economic self-assertion that produces the good neoliberal subject. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 183

Categorization

• XREF: This ‘good neoliberal subject’ concept is a transferable tool for the reader’s analysis of Naqvi’s Home Boy — the tension between communal identity and individual economic self-assertion.
• DEFINE: Introduces the critical distinction between a novel aware of multiculturalism’s fragility versus one that performs its replacement by neoliberal individualism — a usable criterion for reading.