Narrating Islamophobia in fiction itself preserves the Muslim presence it describes

Evidence

These two books offer perhaps our most direct engagement with Islamophobia as a form of cultural racism—with all its posturing and denunciation, implications and insinuations—but one that still most often matches up with an old-style ethnic racism, too. Yet even while they describe attempts to restrict and expel the Muslim from the space of the post-9/11 metropolis, the very act of inscribing the struggles over this project works to preserve the Muslim presence, just as it reveals the city space itself to be the conflicted site of fierce and uncertain microcontests. The stories they tell describe Islamophobia but also reflect on how it is produced—via political expediency, media manipulation, social networking, and word of mouth. In that sense, both are about space but also about the ability to tell stories about space, to claim its meaning for oneself. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 266

Categorization

• XREF: Directly serves the hinge claim that Home Boy and (by extension) The Reluctant Fundamentalist contest rather than merely illustrate Islamophobia — the act of narration is itself preservative.
• DEFINE: Introduces ‘emplotment of space’ as the concept joining geography to fictional narrative authority.