Novels that foreground internal identity divisions can undo clash-of-civilizations polarization

Evidence

Arin Keeble suggests that The Submission rejects pure, authentic notions of identity and emphasizes internal divisions within characters as a way of undoing the reductive polarization of a clash-of-civilizations viewpoint (The 9/11 Novel: Trauma, Politics, and Identity [Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2014], 168, 170). — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 792

Categorization

Category: Connection Points

• XREF: Directly useful for the reader’s task of differentiating contesting vs. reinforcing Islamophobia in Hamid and Naqvi — internal division as a contesting strategy is a testable criterion for both novels.
• SEED: A criterion for the hinge argument: read Hamid and Naqvi for whether characters’ internal divisions are foregrounded or flattened, as evidence of contesting vs. reinforcing the binary.

Related

• Novels contest Islamophobia by foregrounding characters’ internal divisions (similarity 0.93)
• The novel treats political radicalization as displaced personal longing (similarity 0.87)
• Contesting Islamophobia in fiction requires defamiliarizing narrative form, not merely invoking empathy. (similarity 0.83)
• Thrillers can contest Islamophobic truisms by transgressing constructs of essential difference. (similarity 0.81)
• The novel’s formal ambiguities can contest Islamophobic assumptions even in complicit texts (similarity 0.79)
• A novel’s ambivalence can quietly reinforce the very stereotypes it claims to contest (similarity 0.79)
• A discredited academic thesis can still mainstream state Islamophobia. (similarity 0.78)
• Islamist identity is misread when reduced to Arab nationalist sentiment (similarity 0.78)
• Contesting novels deconstruct the frames, not just the content, of the Islamophobia debate (similarity 0.78)
• The liberal novel reaches a boundary in accommodating Islamic political identity claims. (similarity 0.78)