Literary form can reproduce or contest power’s value judgments

Evidence

Shamsie appears to have considered, as a challenge to form, the question of how to guard against merely reproducing the value judgments dictated by economic and political power. As such, she might be said to be offering a fictional correlative for that “planetarity” advocated by Spivak: a mode of ethical critical engagement with inequalities of power that allows Otherness to flourish while eschewing mastery over it. Part of this project involves attending to non-Western cultures in their own languages. Spivak claims that translation is always a watering down of difference, a way of continuing to privilege the European languages into which most translations are rendered. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 422

Categorization

• XREF: Spivak’s planetarity gives a named frame for judging Naqvi/Hamid — does each novel eschew mastery over Otherness or reinscribe it? — connects to: Literary works generate the very situations they also react against — Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious, 1786; Literary forms depend on the social structure of the experience they arise from. — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 697; Audience sympathy for a character is a structural effect of genre and class ideology — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 703