Literary naturalism can normalize a privileged white subject’s exculpatory worldview

Evidence

In explaining away injustice as the product of genetics and in symbolically eliding the anger of the dispossessed with the terrorism of the Islamist, McEwan flattens multiple historical factors and normalizes the exculpatory viewpoint of the rich, white, male subject. In a novel full of optical images, the most disabling blind spot is that experienced by Henry Perowne as he gazes from his bedroom window. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 119

Categorization

• SEED: Core distinction for the reader’s chapter: a novel can ‘contest’ surface Islamophobia while its form normalizes the very structures producing it. Contrast Perowne’s bedside-window blindness with Changez’s situated narration.