Nostalgia for a monocultural past masks contemporary white insecurity.

Evidence

What Nash calls the “spiritual anomie of postmodern capitalist America” is in Updike’s novel blended with a kind of pioneer artisan nostalgia for a “bygone time when people made things by hand, hunched over in their own cottages” (82). Jack’s wife, Beth, picks up this theme, reflecting on the relative comforts of their life together compared to previous generations, “slaving in the mills when cities still made things; people are so afraid of the Arabs, but it’s the Japanese and Chinese and Mexicans and Guatemalans and those others in these low-wage platforms who are doing us in, putting our workforce out of work” (138). … Yet the longing for a supposedly unified culture of the past—which is always in essence monocultural and racially stratified—gives Terrorist something of that “collective melancholia for an idealized national past that never really existed,” identified in the Bush years by Richard Crownshaw. This longing is the American version of the imperial melancholia we see in Amis and McEwan and derives from the same source: white insecurity. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 130

Categorization

• SEED: The ‘imperial melancholia’ concept gives a comparative frame for reading Naqvi and Hamid against Amis-McEwan and Updike as distinct national variants of the same white insecurity.
• ADDENDUM: Directly portable to the reader’s hinge argument about which novel quietly reinforces Islamophobia: Updike’s coded racial longing (‘the Japanese and Chinese… doing us in’) is a case of anxiety displaced from Arabs onto nonwhite labor.
• XREF: connects to: Far-right nostalgia expresses class bewilderment at losing the world — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 303