Minority writers are read as representing a collectivity greater than themselves

Evidence

What has been called “the burden of representation” has long been a feature of multicultural approaches to the arts. It offers both an acknowledgment of the comparatively disenfranchised status that the minority group might have in the public realm with regard to available opportunities for self-expression and a mode of reading the resulting cultural texts with criteria for “placing” them in an unequal cultural marketplace. In early critical studies of British multicultural literature, a sense of the novelty of emerging writing by a so-called second generation is accompanied by a tendency to line up writers according to the communities from which they hail in a sort of “tour round the diasporas” approach, where the assertion of multiculture is in tension with the tendency to treat communities separately. Even so, there is always the implication that such writers are representing a collectivity greater than themselves. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 160

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the ‘burden of representation’ — the central critical concept at stake when reading Hamid and Naqvi as evidence about Muslim experience.
• XREF: Connects to the reader’s hinge work: Home Boy and The Reluctant Fundamentalist are both routinely read as ‘representing’ Pakistani/Muslim experience, the exact burden Morey names here. — connects to: Including marginalized authors without engaging race reproduces tokenism rather than transforming curricula. — bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as…, 85
• SEED: The ‘tour round the diasporas’ reading practice is a sharp hook for an essay on how Hamid and Naqvi are marketed and read as representative of a community rather than as individual visions.