Omniscient narration can preempt paranoid misreadings of a Muslim character

Evidence

However, it is surely ironic in a novel such as The Unknown Terrorist, centrally concerned with the importance of having control over your own story, that the Muslim viewpoint is kept out of the picture entirely. Discomfort with the kind of story the Muslim subject might want to tell, if allowed to do so, appears deeply ingrained in the three thrillers we have looked at. It might even be possible to consider their prevarications an instance of latent Islamophobia: that unconscious prejudice against the kind of unpredictable personal coordinates the observant Muslim character might display. … In the end, the liberal thriller seems to have a strange, evasive relationship to confronting Islamophobia, dodging any engagement with the real racial-cultural coordinates of resurgent majoritarian nationalisms. Although scrupulously not claiming to speak on behalf of suffering Muslim victims in the war on terror, the liberal thriller writers I have examined here nonetheless reaffirm a culturalist bias in choosing not to imaginatively enter the space of the real victims of Islamophobia. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 379 (#complicates, via linked claim)

However, as I argue, Flanagan’s approach also points up some of the shortcomings in the liberal novel’s treatment of Islamophobia: limitations we can also see in the Le Carré and Fesperman novels. These limitations have to do with the fact that the characters who experience discrimination and exclusion most directly or toward whom our emotional investment is directed tend not to be Muslim. Setting aside real-world inequalities, these novels tacitly assume that the reader will more readily identify with the quandaries of protagonists who share a known, familiar cultural orientation. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 355 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim
• XREF: connects to: Limited omniscience suits short fiction because it mirrors real-life limits on knowing others. — Janet Burroway; Elizabeth Stuckey-French; Ned Stuckey-French, Writing Fiction, Tenth Edition: A Guide…, 511; Conspiracy functions as an alternative epistemology when interpretation has no ground truth — , The Braided Reading EPUB: 5-Year…, 105; First-person plural narration can render historically silenced collective experience — , The Braided Reading EPUB: 5-Year…, 199 (+9 more)

Related

• Refusing to narrate Muslim experience can itself constitute latent Islamophobia (similarity 0.86)
• Islamophobia in literature can reside in universalist reading practices rather than overt denunciation (similarity 0.85)
• Liberal thrillers can reinforce Islamophobia by refusing to narrate Muslim interiority (similarity 0.84)
• A novel can expose stereotypes yet trap its own character within them (similarity 0.83)
• Islamophobia includes a latent assumption of Muslim cultural inferiority to the secular West. (similarity 0.81)
• Liberal novels on Islamophobia center non-Muslim protagonists for reader identification (similarity 0.80)
• Omniscient interior access undermines paranoid readings of Muslim characters. (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• A Muslim character’s refusal to explain can be a political contestation, not mere rigidity #complicates (0.60)
• Refusing to narrate Muslim experience can itself constitute latent Islamophobia #complicates (0.55) — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 379
• Liberal novels often center non-Muslim protagonists in Islamophobia stories #complicates (0.50) — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 355