Muslim-authored fiction is read as transparent anthropology, not as art

Evidence

One of the key features of the contemporary critical and receptive context is the demand that writing by Muslim cultural background authors be “representative”—something that has implications for form. The controversy in 2006 about the depiction of the East End Bengali community in Monica Ali’s novel Brick Lane, which spilled over into public demonstrations, is one obvious example. Reactions reflected the assumption that Ali’s much-feted novel was offering a transparent window onto a hitherto overlooked minority group—something that united both protestors against it and the literati who sprang to its defense. … This tendency to view non-Western literatures as essentially anthropological in nature—affording the assumed Western reader an insight into exotically different lives—is a long-standing one. It amounts to what Gayatri C. Spivak has called an “information retrieval” approach in dealing with the literature of the culturally different subject. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 23

Categorization

• DEFINE: Introduces Spivak’s ‘information retrieval’ as the critical vocabulary for the representative-reader trap.
• ADDENDUM: The demand for representativeness is the same pressure my close readings of Home Boy and The Reluctant Fundamentalist must navigate — do they submit to or refuse the transparent-window demand?
• QUESTION: Does Hamid’s use of the unreliable monologue in The Reluctant Fundamentalist function as a deliberate refusal of the ‘transparent window’ demand?