Novels that critique Islamophobia still get co-opted by the market they critique.

Evidence

However, despite its inscription of the pitfalls of reading and writing “the Muslim,” the novel itself—as a marketable commodity—is inevitably implicated in the processes it critiques. In Minaret, Leila Aboulela attempts a realist depiction of the experience of devout female religiosity in a novel that indirectly questions the normative secularity of the novel form in a way that might be called “postsecular.” Yet within the existing market for the Muslim Aboulela’s efforts are liable to be co-opted by that anthropological tendency we have witnessed in response to other novels, in which generic expectations and the burden of representation combine to reinsert the text into prevailing discourses about “the Muslim problem.” — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 70

Categorization

• XREF: Directly relevant to The Reluctant Fundamentalist as evidence — Hamid’s novel is both cited here and is one of the reader’s two novels. This is the heart of the contesting-vs-reinforcing distinction.
• QUESTION: If even a destabilizing novel is inevitably implicated in the processes it critiques, what would distinguish a genuinely contesting novel from one that merely performs critique? This is the reader’s core question.