Scorn for political-correctness in canon debates masks dismissal of non-white literary experience

Evidence

Amis’s second target is political correctness, which he sees as having become dominant in the British secondary-school approach to literature: a symptom of anti-intellectualism resulting in a “hypocritical piety” (18). “The language and literature papers in our national exams,” he notes, “are becoming invitations to ideological conformity; and everyone knows that there are few marks to be had for bucking the earnest line on, say, Maya Angelou” (18). Here a potentially salient point about the limitations of the examination system is overshadowed by the supposedly casual choice of Maya Angelou as herald of what the essay calls a “literature of ingratiation” (18). The effect is to cast aspersions on the literary worth of culturally (and racially) different experience. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 101

Categorization

• DEFINE: Names the rhetorical move (casting aspersions on literary worth) by which ‘anti-political-correctness’ criticism smuggles racial judgment.
• XREF: The technique of attacking non-white writers through ‘quality’ discourse parallels how a novel can reinforce Islamophobia while seeming neutral.